OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)Fujioka tries pressuring Ishihara to go out with him, but Ishihara looks for every way to avoid him, until eventually Naoto steps in.OUR TAKEI’m glad to say we have an episode that takes focus away from Satsuki for at least a little bit, and instead puts it on Ishihara. So far, I’m definitely preferring her as a love interest to Naoto, though I have to admit that’s really just by default, since she at least acts like a mentally stable person and not someone who clearly doesn’t understand boundaries like is the case with Satsuki. But things are not all good in Ishihara’s life, as her stalker ex Fujioka continues trying to approach her about dating again. EXCEPT, as it turns out, he’s NOT her stalker ex…because he was never technically an ex to begin with! Seems he just asked her out, and because Ishihara could not articulate how uncomfortable this made her, he just kinda took that as consent and rolled with it. One could explain that as him simply being an inexperienced teenager who couldn’t read the signals…for maybe the first week, but after that, he clearly should’ve picked up on something. Regardless, she was able to get away from him before, she’s going to keep it that way. Thankfully, Naoto, being the protagonist, gets involved to stop this, though it’s Satsuki who ends up driving him off and making him show his true colors.However, it seems Satsuki is also not giving up her own pursuit of Naoto, which is interesting…because you could just as easily apply some parallels between her and Fujioka, with them both being figures from their respective love interests past who left them with trauma and then tried to work their way back in to those lives like nothing happened, and then proceeding to take the understandable hostility they receive in stride like they’re just playing hard to get. And with Satsuki proclaiming that she will “destroy something Naoto loves” after kissing him without permission again, it seems her continued red flags are going to keep going unacknowledged by the show itself, and probably by Naoto too at some point. It honestly just kinda seems like an example of this show thinking that unwanted advances by women to men are somehow more harmless and innocuous than these things happening the other way around, which is quite frankly something that we should have moved past, but it’s clear that manga and anime have not for the sake of exploitative titillation. At least we’re almost halfway done with this crap.