The Rhythmic Gymnastics Fangirl and Badminton Fanboy

Summary

• Summer training intensifies for Taiki, leading to unexpected encounters and valuable insights from a rival.
• Hina takes the lead in setting up a romantic scenario at the fireworks festival, opening up new possibilities.
• Taiki and Hina’s dynamic gets more intimate, potentially complicating their friendship in future episodes.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Blue Box, Episode 11, “Uncool!”, now streaming on Netflix.

Blue Box episode 11, “Uncool”, fully plunges the show into summer vacation after it started in the previous episode. If you’re a fan of school anime, you probably already have some expectations of what might happen in this episode. Taiki, Chinatsu, Hina, and the rest of their friends will be spending this, and potentially the next few episodes, attending summer training, festivals, finishing homework, and a lot of other popular tropes in anime summer arcs.

The big bomb dropped at the end of Blue Box episode 10, “It’s Not a Good Thing”, where Chinatsu essentially friend-zoned Taiki, plays a big part of this episode. Taiki is still in shock, but Chinatsu acts like nothing happened and behaves like how she’s always been with Taiki.

Taiki’s Summer Training

The Grind Never Stops

As established in the previous episode, Taiki will still go to school to continue training in the badminton club. It’s not all just regular practice with their team though, as Haryu invited Taiki to a college his senior goes to for a practice session. To Taiki’s surprise, the person who beat him and Haryu in the prefectural qualifiers, Hyodo, was also in that practice session. Surprisingly though, Hyodo turned out to be a pretty likable guy. He even gave Taiki some pointers so he’d stand a better chance against Yusa next year. In an inner monologue, Hyodo even mentions that he loves watching underdogs win. It’s nice to see a character who isn’t so hell-bent on winning for his team all the time and helping out players from rival teams. Although to be fair, Hyodo is graduating, so he won’t have to face Taiki next year at all.

Leading Up To The Fireworks Festival

Hina Makes Her Move

As some viewers might have already predicted, yes, this episode of Blue Box features a visit to a summer fireworks festival. Not only does it have a festival, but the festival is what the entire episode was leading up to. It started with Taiki and Hina overhearing some students talking about going to a fireworks festival, which led to an adorable flashback that showed how Taiki and Hina’s friendship started. Their middle school class had all planned to go to a fireworks festival together, but Hina ended up being really late because of rhythmic gymnastics practice. The big thing she had been looking forward to at the festival was the candied apples they sold, but by the time she arrived, the stall had already run out of them. Fortunately for her, Taiki had overheard her saying she wanted candied apples back at school and saved one just for her. From then on, they became close friends, and now they’re teetering on the edge of something more.

After reminiscing about their first festival, Hina steels her nerves and manages to invite Taiki to the upcoming one. Unfortunately, Taiki assumes that they’ll be going as a group with all their other friends. Upon confronting her about who else will go, Hina quickly rushes to invite her friends, but all of them already have plans. Taiki managed to invite Kyo, but Kyo quickly realized that Hina probably wanted the festival for some alone time with Taiki. There’s a funny scene of Kyo acting as a wingman for Hina by pretending to be sick and saying he can’t go to the festival, ensuring that it’ll just be the two of them.

Hina Almost Self-Sabotages (Though It Still Might Lead To That)

Weirdly enough, Hina seems to treat romance the same way a typical sports anime protagonist tackles their sport. She wants to win, but she wants her rival to be at their strongest, giving them a hand even if it means she’s just making things harder for herself. Throughout the episode, she kept inquiring about Taiki’s situation with Chinatsu and asking him whether or not he plans on inviting her to the festival. Hina even encourages Taiki not to give up on Chinatsu, because the Taiki she’d come to love is someone who won’t back down so easily. While he doesn’t do anything about it for now, her encouragement might just come and bite her in the back in future Blue Box episodes.

“This isn’t like you! Not wanting to trouble your crush or mess up your relationship. I get that those things are scary and make it hard to act. But even if you’re scared, I want you to value yourself just as much as you do others. Being able to stay positive is… what makes you cool.” – Hina to Taiki about his hesitation with Chinatsu

The Beginning of Hina and Taiki’s First Date

Though Only One of Them Knows It’s Even A Date

After training with Haryuu, Hyodo, and their college acquaintances, Taiki heads straight for the fireworks festival to meet up with Hina. He arrived first and, just like in middle school, bought some candied apples for her in advance. The episode ends with Hina showing up in a yukata to finally start their date.

Taiki showed some suspicious hints a few times in the episode that kind of made it look like he was developing a crush on Hina. He felt flustered when Kyo mentioned that he couldn’t come and that it was just him and Hina. It looked like he was conscious that it felt like a date, even though they were just friends. This happened again when he saw Hina in a yukata, being shocked; as if this was the first time he realized how pretty she looked, and avoided eye contact with her.

Look, even Hina fans get it. In the long run, Taiki is most likely still going to favor Chinatsu, since that’s just how shows like this go, but these brief moments that make you think Hina has a chance are so well done that you just can’t help but think what if. It seems like the next episode is still going to show more of their relationship, but it might all come to a screeching halt because earlier in the episode, Chinatsu and the girls’ basketball team also made plans to go to the festival. An encounter might be inevitable, so how will Chinatsu react to seeing Hina and Taiki together in next week’s episode of Blue Box?

Blue Box is now available to stream on Netflix. The release date for Blue Box, episode 12, is set to be December 19, 2024 at 8:30 AM PT.