“cute cute CUTE”

He sure can't lie...

I don’t know why they decided to do this but I gotta be honest, anon, I hate it. 😭

For real though, if I may be overly earnest for a moment. I’m unhappy about this turn in the story for a few reasons:

Minato’s Laundromat has always been firmly grounded in mundane reality. The sudden amnesia trope feels absurdly out of place here and immediately broke the rules of its storytelling universe as I have come to understand them across two seasons.

The reason I was excited about this season is because it is going beyond the season 1 question of whether they would get together, and instead interrogating how these two would stay together. We have spent nine weeks in this second season watching them slowly come to understand each other better and find a way to meet each other’s needs, resulting in Minato finally making the small but meaningful gestures Shin has been begging for. That this trope is being deployed as a device to immediately reset that hard earned relationship development we’ve spent weeks building to is especially grating.

Hand in hand with that, Minato has been on a long, frustrating, often hard to watch journey to overcome his internalized homophobia and become a decent partner for Shin who can communicate his emotions and reciprocate his affections. He was getting there, and in this episode he finally seems to have had some kind of breakthrough, and now it feels like the narrative is punishing him for that. It sends a very strange message, and even as I recognize they may use the amnesia to push him even further into confidently declaring his devotion to Shin, I don’t want an artificial drama event used as a cheap device to accelerate his growth. I want to finish the painstaking journey we’ve been on with him this entire time.

The decision to immediately undercut any catharsis or satisfaction the audience might have gotten from Minato finally expressing his feelings properly is just plain mean, both to the characters and the audience. As @bengiyo has said, this season has been all tension and no release, and the moment they finally gave us a small bit of release, they immediately yanked it back and ratcheted up the tension tenfold. It doesn’t feel fun or satisfying as a viewer.

Shintaro: It’s just a crush

Shu: My heart’s being crushed?!