Before actually getting into the episode, I'm still having this weird love hate relationship with school competitions. The thing that irks me the most about this whole ordeal is the seriousness the students have. I know competitions usually bring the competitive side of people, but the fact that winning or losing doesn't really impact anything is where the whole dissonance comes into play for me. The competition itself isn't what matters, but the event that happen around it is the thing that makes it more interesting. And as of episode twelve, the only thing important that happens is the "accident" during the battle boarding race that ended up injuring Mari.
The main reason I put accident in quotes is the fact that as soon as Mari collided with the other racer, I was quickly reminded of that car when First High School was making their way to this competition. At first it seemed like that was merely some happenstance, but after closer examination, there was some magic involved and the so called accident was very much intentional. The biggest question I have is why would anyone want to interfere with something as minor as a school competition? The fact that whoever is involved would go as far as attempting to injure two people -- but only one ended up injured -- then there must be something they get from stopping the likely winner to prosper.
The only other things that happened in this episode that was moderately interesting were: the weapon that was teased in the previous episode, the magic being used by Shizuku during the speed shooting, and Shizuku also wanting to hire Tatsuya as her family's engineer. The weapon was something that experimented with fortification magic and essentially made the sword separate into two but still moved in unison and felt like one object; an interesting "toy" that Tatsuya is working on. And the magic Shizuku use was vibration magic to detect when targets enter the area of effect. I'm not sure if this type of magic is purely Tatsuya's thinking or is already Shizuku speciality but Tatsuya enhanced it's range. It is probably the latter, either way it was an intriguing display.
As you can tell, this episode wasn't that engaging for me and I ended up skimming on the details. If nothing that thought-provoking happens in these competitions, I never find that much interest in them. I guess I'm glad I do these posts in two episode bursts because the next one was far more interesting to me.
The streak for anything that Tatsuya touches is bound to succeed continues as the girl side of speed shooting gets a clean sweep of first through third. Comparing that to the boy's side, where only one of them barely made it with third place, you can see this clear gap in skill. And to top all this off, the Magic University want to register the magic that Shizuku was using as a new type of magic. This is when the intolerably modest Tatsuya comes into play when it came to the name to put down for who developed this magic -- he wanted Shizuku's name as who developed it.
The excuse that Tatsuya gave felt very nonsensical when he first said it, and it turned out it was when talked to Miyuki about his true intension. The reason had to do with his family, the Yotsuba's, more specifically his aunt. Which also ties into the identity that Tatsuya has as "Mr. Silver", which he doesn't want to be relieved and that is why he is listening to his aunt. It kind of seems like his family, including Miyuki, is his only weakness if he had any; however Tatsuya still acknowledges that he can defeat his aunt if he wanted to, but it would be impractical at this moment.
With this background conflict happening within the family, I'm still wondering why Miyuki stick to Tatsuya so much. Right now all I can really pull is the fact that he is good at pretty much everything. However it might also be that he is the only family member that isn't trying to make her take the lead spot of the family and just talks to her like a normal person. Either way, I personally still find it strange that Miyuki would be so attached to Tatsuya.
The scene after Honoka won the battle boarding race was probably the most memorable scene in this episode for me. This was the first time I saw Tatsuya show signs of being flustered and that was pretty funny but also really just a great thing to watch. Unfortunately, we will probably never really see much emotions coming from Tatsuya, outside of being around Miyuki, for quite a while.
Beside that side note of mine, we found out who caused this battle boarding accident; these businessman call themselves "bookmakers" and I'm wondering if that is in the literal sense, like they make books, or is that some type of code name. Regardless, the reason for all this is to keep their profits up by making this competition less predictable. So they want these competitions to be interesting to the people attending in order to make more profit; essentially, based on the words chosen by them, it seem like they work for or are running this Nine School Competition.
As for the closing scene of this episode, we saw the harem that was gather around Tatsuya just from his engineering prowess. This was one of the more ridiculous scenes I've seen in a while because it looked like every single girl attended the party was around Tatsuya except two off to the side -- one of them being Miyuki. The thing that made it more funny than dumb was Morisaki scowling as the girls continued to praise Tatsuya. I can't help but think he will be one of the few character in this series that doesn't like Tatsuya and that is a bit of fresh air, or salt, in the sea of praises.
Overall I would say this episode was a bit better than the previous only because it is going somewhere rather than just starting the main conflict of this arc. I'm hoping there will at least a small amount of challenge for First High School because we only really see the girls succeed without much resistance. However, with Morisaki's declaration, we might see something interesting happen on the boy's side of this competition pretty soon.
