To truly open up to another is a pursuit fraught with danger. To reveal both our passions and our vulnerabilities invites misunderstanding, our rough edges frequently pinching and bruising as they align in ill concert with the sharp extremities of another. As Schopenhauer described and Evangelion agreed, for those not naturally inclined to absolute sincerity, intimacy is a hedgehog’s dilemma, a process by which we hurt each other precisely because we wish to grow closer. And after a season’s worth of managing that process with whatever grace they could muster, Ryuji and Taiga have at last been torn apart by the very closeness of their feelings, and their desperation to understand each other.

For a while, their friendship was effortless because the stakes were so low. Having outright declared their mutual desire to date the other’s best friend, and with a certain degree of mutual animosity assumed as part of the bargain, they were free to grow close without worrying about what that closeness meant, or where their bond might eventually take them. They could both sympathize and skewer each other because they were never afraid of what the other thought of them – after all, they were simply co-conspirators, nothing more. But as it turns out, when you have precisely one friend with whom you can share your most private or ungenerous thoughts, that dynamic swiftly becomes its own sort of emotional bond. Because they initially didn’t care about each other’s opinions, they were able to grow so close that no one’s feelings could matter more.

It was this silent migration, this unspoken shift from proudly declared indifference to absolute mutual trust, that allowed the return of Taiga’s father to rend them so completely. As teenagers with deep self-esteem issues and more than the usual case of relational jitters, it was their refusal to actually define their relationship that allowed them to grow so intimate. However, that lack of definition also meant that when their feelings diverged, they lacked the certainty of definition necessary to stabilize; they could not simply say, “hey, I care about you deeply, and I’d like to talk through our disagreement here.” Instead, Taiga avoids her father for reasons Ryuji cannot understand, Ryuji demands Taiga appreciate her father for reasons she can’t understand, and the two end up misaligned precisely because, in spite of their mutual misunderstanding, the undefinable feeling they’ve built together is the most important thing in their world.

As such, even as they are divided by their mismatched trauma, the fact that Taiga is willing to validate Ryuji’s projection only proves how much she still cares. Having been until now incapable of truly admitting to their weaknesses, Taiga accepts Ryuji’s plea largely on faith, knowing only that her opportunity to make right with her father is something of desperate importance to her closest friend. And for his part, actually voicing his pain instantly made things clearer to Ryuji – how he was assigning his own feelings to his partner, and how dismissive that was of Taiga’s own experience. Though they are separated, the violence of that separation was like a bandage tearing from an old scar – now, with their wounds revealed in each other’s eyes, they might truly begin to heal.

Fortunately, before any of that gooey emotional stuff can happen, our heroes have a school festival to distract themselves with! We return to the drama with festival preparations in full swing, the latest in a procession of scholastic preoccupations that so often dull the ache of painful adolescent sincerity, giving us something to feign total absorption with as tempers cool and bruises heal. Time might not heal all wounds, but it certainly lessens their sting, allowing angry first instincts to subside and the substance of our fundamental feelings to reassert itself. “I have to say, this isn’t too bad,” Ryuji thinks to himself, surveying his classroom at work. Sometimes it’s nice to just lean into being a teenager.

With the school festival serving as a bonding agent, it’s easy enough for Ryuji and Taiga to maintain their neutral banter, falling into old patterns even as they navigate this new realm of mutual sincerity. Ryuji’s reflections on how hard Taiga’s father is trying ring like a half-apology, as if he’s trying to simultaneously take back his prior insistence while nonetheless maintaining he wasn’t really wrong. And Taiga, though she pushes back, doesn’t even necessarily disagree; through her acceptance of her father’s entreaties, she forgives Ryuji as well, wordlessly assuring him that her sacrifice hasn’t actually been so bad. Though the pair have difficulty expressing themselves directly, they have become very good at expressing themselves indirectly in a way that is clear to both of them, that actually affirms how well they understand each other.

As Taiga expresses her faith in her father (and Ryuji by proxy) by asking for a bigger part in the play, it falls to Minori to offer a splash of reality. Her facade drops with a furious “what the hell” as Ryuji proudly reports on Taiga’s process, and she instantly declares that “I have to tell Taiga she can’t trust that lousy father of hers.” Ryuji balks at this, countering “shouldn’t you be happy for Taiga, as her friend?” Likely because Taiga is usually so defensive, Ryuji can’t understand how much faith she is placing in him in choosing to trust her father again. Everything she is doing, she is doing for Ryuji – and yet he still clings to the belief that he is working for Taiga’s happiness.

“Why would I be happy about my friend’s dad slinking back to trick her,” Minori responds, offering precisely the defense Taiga was seeking at the end of last episode. Her desperation for a friend in her corner, the friend that Ryuji couldn’t be due to his own parental hangups, is bitterly realized through Minori exclaiming that “I could never smile and watch while my friend is being hurt. Were you even paying attention when you met him? Did you take a good look at him!?” But wrapped in his own pain, Ryuji chooses to defend Taiga’s father in the face of both his closest friend and his crush. As the two angrily separate, Taiga can only look on in horror, sacrificing ever more of herself in order to placate Ryuji’s misdirected pain.

Ryuji’s frustration leads him to Ami’s special spot between the vending machines, only to be shooed back to his feet by Ami herself. “I never thought I’d hear her talk like that,” he grumbles, to which Ami replies with an unimpressed “wow, that’s obnoxious.” And she’s right – Ryuji is proving quick to put other people in boxes, defining their feelings according to what he personally wants from them. “Badmouthing her behind her back isn’t going to earn you any sympathy,” she continues, doing her best to prod Ryuji back down the right path. She clearly sees a lot of herself in Ryuji’s ungenerous instincts and antisocial tendencies, but still believes his fundamental nature is kinder, more innocent than hers. He is someone she can help protect from the sacrifices and unhappiness she has experienced in her own life, and she has decided that if she can’t have him as a partner, she’ll at least help him as a project.

“You’ve really changed,” he says in backhanded praise, to which she responds “is that how it seems?” For she hasn’t changed, not really; she’s just chosen to share more of her earnest self with him. To Ryuji, who isn’t really the most emotionally intelligent person, simple intimacy can feel like character growth – just like how with Taiga, her willingness to humor her father is interpreted without factoring in how his own feelings alter the equation. “Figure it out yourself,” she tells him. “I won’t cling to you the way the tiger does. And I won’t become your shining sun, the way Midori-chan is.” For the career idol, this is the ultimate statement of respect – to be neither idol nor idolizer, but someone who “will walk the same path as you.”

That sincerity is in short supply between Taiga and Ryuji, who only learns from his mother that Taiga’s father was prepping to clear out her apartment. “I don’t want Taiga to leave. She’s part of our family,” his mom declares, casually offering the words Ryuji himself could not. Through emphasizing Taiga’s need to reconnect with her father, Ryuji was simultaneously expressing something he never meant to say: that Taiga’s bond with himself and his mother wasn’t valid, was just a makeshift replacement for a real family. Ryuji’s insecurity about coming from a single parent home led him to deny the family he’d actually found, to deny the significance of his bond with Taiga. And Taiga, who cares about him more than anything, was willing to sacrifice her found family to please him.

Ryuji takes refuge in misunderstanding, replying only that “if that’s what Taiga wants, it’s fine.” He continues to assume Taiga is happy simply because she’s not complaining – which is frankly not the most unreasonable assumption, considering how she generally reacts to anything she dislikes. His obliviousness to how much Taiga cares about his opinion has made him blind to the fact that she’s uncomfortable with how things are proceeding, and merely putting on a brave face to please him.

Which is all the more frustrating, as that was their initial bond – their mutual willingness to share their uncharitable, selfish emotions with each other, embodied through that shared moment kicking the hell out of a lamppost. But when you start to care about someone, that concern creates its own sense of distance – you want them to think kindly of you, and thus you start acting in such a way as to ensure that remains the case. Our bonds can actually separate us, if we don’t take care to assure each other that our concern is not conditional, that our love is sturdy. And Ryuji has not been proving that at all; in fact, all through this he’s demonstrated he cares more about seeing a realization of his own dreams than Taiga’s actual feelings.

At the window, Taiga tells Ryuji that he needs to apologize to Minori. Ryuji grumbles that he doesn’t think he said anything wrong, to which Taiga replies “it’s not about right and wrong. There are more important issues at hand.” Taiga is applying the same logic she used to accept her father’s presence in this argument – that the truth of the situation doesn’t matter, the most important thing is ensuring her close bonds are protected. It’s a very un-Taiga-like perspective, as someone who’s always been such an obstinate, straightforward sort of person, and it demonstrates both how much she’s bending her own philosophy for this new venture, and in turn how terrified she is of losing her friends.

But before anything more can be resolved, the festival is upon them.

Tension builds as the day’s performances play out, each confrontation of idol princess Ami and palm-top tiger Taiga rendered in lovingly loose flourishes of character acting. Their wrestling performance serves as an uncomfortable echo of their personal choices, each of them leaning into the personas their classmates had assigned them, playing the fool in order to be accepted and just maybe loved. Backstage, Taiga checks her phone time and again, anxious to know when her father might arrive. Because of Ryuji, she chose to trust in him once more, even though he’d done nothing to deserve it. Now she once again has hope he will care about her passions, and can once again be hurt by his neglect.

But still, there is no answer, no signal that Taiga might once get to defy expectations and earn the crowd’s applause. Ryuji’s confidence fades as the day continues, slipping towards a certainty that his mother was right, that rather than reconnecting her with her family, he has robbed her of the family she thought she had found. In his demands that she perform happiness for her absent father, Ryuji has become little different from the parents who abandoned her, just another stranger who wants something from her. Taiga does not need to be sculpted, only supported – and by putting his own regrets before the feelings of his friend, Ryuji has proven he cannot be relied on, cannot be the shoulder she seeks when all the world is against her.

Taiga’s father never shows up for her performance, and Taiga never gets to play the hero. In his attempts to reconstruct his friend’s original family and quell his own regrets, Ryuji ultimately just proves that Taiga has no family at all.

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