Amagami SS - Episode 26

Amagami SS was a broadly entertaining and occasionally completely bizarre romance anime, and if it was missing one thing you could argue that missing element was more of protagonist Junichi Tachibana's sister Miya, aka she of the weird yet oddly adorable laugh.  Lo and behold, this additional bonus twenty-sixth episode resolves this very imbalance by focusing itself entirely upon Miya.

Despite Junichi causing her no end of hassle, Miya can't help but be concerned about her brother and his apparent lack of future - a thought she posits to her friends only to find them to be rather defensive of her brother's actions and demeanour.  This sets the tone for an episode that somehow manages to blend all of the main series otherwise disparate arcs into a single melting pot, placing Junichi in a role as good friends with all of the show's other main girls as Miya watches on and spies upon her brother in surprise at his popularity.

With so many girls surrounding him but no outright girlfriend, Miya comes to the only logical conclusion - that her brother is gay; a conclusion quickly shot down by Junichi himself, needless to say.  However, it takes an incident with a lost kitten and Junichi helping Miya to find its mother for the latter to really settle upon her own feelings of protectiveness towards her brother - complete with some rather odd "play-biting", and far too little of Miya's trademark laugh if you ask me.

Despite a plot which meandered between the generic and the downright strange, this was a largely amusing bonus episode to Amagami SS if only due to its playful line in self-referential behaviour and mixing together all of its story arcs into one unholy melting pot without a care in the world; an approach which worked better than it probably should have thanks to its borderline fourth-wall breaking behaviour.  Aside from that, Miya's own involvement in this episode was a little dull - not that I was hoping for some kind of full-on incest arc (I wasn't, for the record) but it would have been nice to see her potential as a more fully-fleshed out character better realised than the slightly fawning and dull girl we were treated to here.  That said.... aww, look at the lost kitty!  Awwwwwwww..... sorry, was I saying something about Amagami SS?  I've entirely lost my train of though...