With every episode, I appreciate Ramparts of Ice‘s refusal to fall back on expected relationship dynamics more and more. Normally, you get a group of four cishet teenagers, two on each end of the gender spectrum, and within three episodes I can tell you who is going to fall in love with who, what the source of drama will be, and so on. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since there are plenty of perfectly predictable romances where I love the characters deeply, but it’s a delightful surprise when it makes some unexpected moves while still avoiding contrivances.

Going into this episode, I thought I had a good handle on things. Miki likes Minato. Minato likes Koyuki. Koyuki would realize she has feelings for Yota, and Yota is in love with his stepmother. Bada-bing, bada-boom, messy teenagers having lots of feelings. Nobody’s love is requited and everyone is miserable, but somehow they get through it. Happily, that’s not what is happening!

In this episode, we dig into Yota’s own issues, but first we get an amuse bouche of Koyuki’s rich stew of mental trauma to go along with it. Turns out, her parents are divorced, which shattered the image of a functional family she had growing up and left her struggling to connect to the other, exacerbating the sense of isolation she had developed from being bullied. Her father seems to have exited the picture entirely, harming her self-image as a person who is loved, and her single working mother has made Koyuki something of a latchkey kid. Loneliness makes us vulnerable; I suspect this was another factor that led her to try dating Igarashi, even though she resented his teasing.

Yota, on the other hand, feels shut out. His stepmother is nothing but kind to him and his younger siblings clearly adore him, yet he’s internalized a sense that he doesn’t really belong. The thoughts that he doesn’t really fit in at home torment him at night; while Koyuki has responded to her trauma by shutting people out, he’s become too accommodating and fails to care for himself. 

To get a bit personal, I couldn’t help but think of my own family watching Yota’s. I am, after all, a twin with an older half-brother. Our dad and his mom divorced when he was young, and our dad moved to another city and met my mom, who is only twelve years older than my older brother. I love my brother, and I know he loves me and my twin, but did he resent us? I know for a long time he felt like we were the family our father had chosen over him. Did it haunt him the way it haunts Yota? Am I projecting too much from a story onto someone who I’m afraid to try to fully understand for fear of discovering old scars?

Similarly, Koyuki worries that by trying to connect her situation to his own, she’ll be overstepping. Still, she takes the step of trying to reach out to him. It’s a wonderful moment of growth, her recognition that even if their situations are different, they may be able to connect over their sense of displacement in their own homes. Koyuki at the start of the series would never have dared attempt this; she would be convinced that there would be no way they could come to understand each other, that the gulf between their situations was too great. It’s the expected character arc, of course, but isn’t the point of a show like that getting the satisfaction of seeing a closed-off character open up?

Their sweet scene on a park bench ends with a confession: Yota likes…

….

….

Wait for it….

…

Miki! Not his stepmom, not Koyuki, but Miki. And Koyuki doesn’t respond with an unexpected-to-her upswell of jealousy, but sincere delight that someone who knows all sides of Miki likes her, and not just the genki-girl idol image she projects to her classmates. There are even some fun flashbacks to Yota’s sudden clumsy moments, connecting them to being around Miki. Foreshadowing! 

It’s incredibly sweet how happy Koyuki is for Miki, without a single thought about her kinda-maybe-sorta having romantic feelings of her own for Yota. She’s happy for her friend, and I’m happy both that she’s happy and that the show has some juice beyond established genre beats.

Will it create complications that Miki looks at Koyuki and Yota and only sees that the two have incredible chemistry? Hmmm…

Rating:

Ramparts of Ice is currently streaming on
Netflix.