One of the fun things of reading a manga or watching an anime that didn’t start out with a rock-solid grasp of its own identity is the sometimes-futile-but-always-amusing attempts to meld a bunch of disparate elements together into something that feels like a complete product. Maybe it’s just that I prefer mixed genre shows to pure cases of one element, but I, at least, gravitate towards shows that have that organic feel. It’s one of the reasons I like mid-tier monthly manga so much; between their loud, energetic character types and their solid+ grasp of visual techniques, they hold a little more intrinsic cohesion than the field. Put another way, you can mix vastly disparate genres provided your characters are amusing and your visual acumen is there.

Hence the candid camera

And this was the week Arpeggio really flashed its chops in that regard. Already having solidly established the show in the naval combat department, the Kishi/Uezu team really embraced the harem comedy components of the show this week, and the result was pretty much up to their track record, an effective combination of character-centric gags that cleared the air after last week’ darker dramatic turn.

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Though this week’s episode featured a battle about as explosive as the rest of them in the series, it lacked the punch of episodes 2 and 4. The main reason for that is that, while the first two battles were tactical affairs that featured Iona’s crew out-clevering a superior force, this fight consisted mostly of Haruna holding off ground forces with a nanomachine double and some magic force fields. And some scenes of Kirishima fighting as a stuffed bear; to be fair, that was a pretty cool usage of a character who was overacted in the first place.

This week also saw a wrapping-up of the mini-arc featuring Haruna, Kirishima, and Makie’s newfound friendship. The whole arc was pretty standard “aliens befriending humans” stuff, and I don’t have too much to say about that. It’ll be interesting, though, to see how those three mesh with Iona’s crew as they all head towards where Takao is now being presumably imprisoned.