Harukana Receive – Episode 3 – Kanata and the Thomas Twins

Haruka finally starts her first day of school. After leaving the teacher office, she sees a blonde hair girl taking Kanata somewhere. Who is it?

Haruka starts her first day of school. However, she saw a blonde hair girl dragging her somewhere. It happens to be Claire Thomas, who have a hyperactive personality. She happens to be one of Kanata’s former beach volleyball friends. She has a younger twin sister, Emily Thomas who has a more diligent personality. After school. Haruka and Kanata had a practice match against them.

While Claire messes up her serve, thus giving Haruka’s team a point, Haruka’s team couldn’t score a point afterwards. The only way for her to score is to do a Pokey, which Kanata didn’t want to do since it goes against her play style. After Haruka manages to score a point from doing a Pokey, she decides to give it a try. She manages to get it over, but it went out of bounds. After the match, Haruka decides to do the junior tournament. That night, Kanata retells the story on how she became friends with Narumi and the failed promise she made to her to compete in nationals. With that, Haruka decides to become partners with Kanata and she accepts.

It seems that Claire and Emily watched their match from last time. They are probably amazed that Kanata decided to play beach volleyball again. Still, the surprising things about them is that Kanata with Narumi defeated them in a tournament.

Still, Claire is definitely a fun character given how energetic she is. She even tries to undress her younger sister’s uniform to reveal her swimsuit. The funny part is that Claire slaps Emily’s butt when they score their first point. Yep, Emily didn’t like it and chased after her. Then again, she probably liked it, but won’t admit it.

Of course, this is not the interesting aspect of the match. It seems that Emily was serious in bringing Kanata back to her former self. After all, she knows that Kanata can do better. On the other hand, it’s understandable why Kanata didn’t want to do the pokey at first since it goes against her play style. She used to be a power player and can get by with scoring points using spikes. However, it seems that Emily and Claire gotten better since then that Kanata’s strategy of spiking her way to victory isn’t going to work. Kanata’s short stature doesn’t help either.

In short, Kanata needs to expand her horizons and not be afraid to use the Pokey. Thankfully, it only took Haruka performing a Pokey to give Kanata the confidence to do it herself. It worked out in the end, although it went out of bounds. From this, I feel that Kanata finally got her mojo back.

At last, we learn more about how Kanata became friends with Narumi. Narumi happened to have transferred during elementary school and Kanata wanted to become friends with her. It’s interesting how she became friends thanks to teaching her how to play beach volleyball. They even promise to win nationals, which is probably the wrong move on Kanata’s behalf.

Sadly, the friendship didn’t work out mostly because of Kanata being overconfident after all those wins. She believed that she can do the same in Nationals when it’s not necessarily the case. If only Kanata managed her expectations properly and not became overconfident, she would probably still make her friendship with Narumi work. Then again, Narumi is shy to begin with compared to the more outgoing Haruka.

With Kanata finally back to her former self and Haruka decides to become her partner, I feel that they are finally ready for their first match. Either way, it should be interesting to see how they will do in their first tournament. ¶