Beatrice

The show is surprisingly detailed in addressing the different issues that come in up in the self ruminating, romantic, platonic, and time gap inter relations that occurs within it's short run time so well that it's a shame that it was not full hour episodes to explore even further. I think the writers would have been able to round out the story with an even stronger finish.

It's really beautiful that Shion found that she actually grew a lot as a person despite the core trauma that still impacted her well into age 29. She found her passion the craft of make up and look like the person they want to be, like for herself, which really grounded her in a way that her high school self hadn't found yet. I thought it was funny she left the house in a full outfit and hair done only to go to work to change into a uniform and different hair style. The denim shirts for the school uniforms is really cute and easy way to stand out from the other school uniforms. Shion using her mom's contact lenses was wild though. Prescriptions are not interchangeable unless her mom has the same or really close to hers.

I like that she immediately confronted her crush for being cruel to another girl that gives him a crush confession. He genuinely thought that it was more efficient to be mean because he had a bad experience of people not knowing no means no, but she tells him it's actually traumatic and to stop and understands. If there was more time to episodes they could have shown him rejecting someone in a kinder way. I also liked that he pointed out that originally he never got to know Shion properly because every time he tried to talk to her, she would get all weird and leave, like she didn't like him. She's so in her own head that she didn't even know how she was coming off.

It's really nice that there's an actual cause for Shion's time travel. Mitsuki's jealous friend Kaoru putting a curse on the group picture rather than a love spell so it causes Shion and later her Mitsuki and Souma to time travel back to the moment the picture was taken. The age and experience difference is slightly touched on between her and Souma and actually impacts her decision to go back to her own timeline. She misses her own timeline's versions of her parents and best friend. That's pretty sophisticated understanding more than most protagonists in time travel narratives. I do want to see for once that someone time travels back to their teenage selves and does not want anything to do with their crush anymore because they no longer see teenagers as peers. The ending with the grown up version Souma getting memory of his alternate timeline counterpart is really convenient, but can chalk it up to some fictional quantum entanglement and magic. This is where if there were more episode time per episode or more episodes, they could explore a bit more of their relationship as well the friendships in present time line.