Blue Period | E7 and E8: Exam Time.

I’ll mention this time and time again, the biggest reason why I continue to watch and be fascinated by Blue Period is that it feels very real. While the characters are not, the experiences they go through are. Blue Period, I think is as close as we’ll get to an anime being, in a way, a story of someone’s life. So much of what I experienced over the past two episodes felt real.

The anxiety Yaguchi feels as the art exams grow closer and closer. Questioning whether or not the decision to pursue art was something he should have done. Whether his art can hold up against others who are simply better than him in every aspect of it. The fear of not being good enough despite giving it your best, that fear of knowing that if this dream fails, we have nothing to fall back on; we have real fears and feelings. That’s what fascinates me a lot about Blue Period, despite it being an anime and about art, the emotions Yaguchi feels are something that I can connect and relate to. So in that respect, it also feels like in a way Yaguchi is me.

Episodes seven and eight sees Yaguchi still fighting with himself. Ooba has been a great supporting character because she’s doing her best to help guide Yaguchi and to help him overcome these mental blocks that he has put in front of himself. However, in typical Yaguchi fashion, he always finds a way to overthink and overengineer constructive criticism. But somehow, someway Yaguchi finds a way to overcome it for a brief moment during the first exams. Only to follow it up by going back to question himself and whether or not his art is good enough to pass. Yaguchi temporarily finds the answer only to quickly lose it and that to me is extremely interesting.

That has been a trend I’ve noticed over the past few episodes. Yaguchi is presented with a problem, we see him work through the problem. Then, we see him temporarily solve the problem only to immediately lose the answer. It’s almost as if him being hyperfocused is both a blessing and a curse. He can find the solution, but will immediately forget the answer once the assignment has been completed. Then Yaguchi will spend the next couple of episodes wondering where the answer he previously found had gone, once he gets lost again.

I don’t know if I explained that the way I wanted to, but hopefully you more or less get the point. I also felt bad for Yuka especially during the first exam because the assignment was to draw a self-portrait. However, how she is viewed by society and how she views herself are two entirely different things. When you live in a country where everything about Yuka is still a rather touchy subject (I could be wrong), in Yuka’s case, she doesn’t know whether or not the portrait she does draw is something that will ultimately be accepted because of how she views herself is different from society. So in that regard, Yuka drawing an “X” on her canvas as the self-portrait makes total sense because she’s is someone who has been rejected by society. It also could imply that Yuka is now starting to question her own identity and doesn’t know how she wants to be viewed anymore, so the “X” could mean that as well.

Overall, regarding the emotional side of things, episodes seven and eight were episodes I liked. Whenever I write about any episode relating to Blue Period, I always have to step back and think about what the episode meant to me, the message it was trying to tell. It’s maybe because I get to overthink the meaning of each episode but I do genuinely think that each episode has a message it’s trying to tell and it’s up to me (the viewer) to find and interpret it. 7.5/10