[FreshToku]

Yeeeeeah Kusaka hitting Mari isn't great. Not that I find it particularly out-of-character for the people involved, but it's treated simply as just one more instance of Kusaka's facade cracking instead of the tipping (spilling, really) point that it should be. I don't think the show realises that action is on a completely different level from everything else he's done.

Better things to think about are Murakami. I don't know why I seemed to have completely forgot about him sometime after I finished watching the show, because he's actually pretty cool as the big-brained leader of Smart Brain. Not that much depth, but that's on par with Lucky Clover. Then again, I somehow also forgot that Kitazaki has an 'Accel Mode' of his own. If he was still Delta at this point, wouldn't it be funny if he just could move that fast on his own because he felt like it?

Speaking of, Mari has a flashback that shows Kitazaki there during all the traumatic stuff, and it's probably fair to assume that he's more responsible for all that slaughtering that happened that day instead of Takumi. You mentioned that you like Mari has to make up for how she treated Takumi, and I do too, so that's why this revelation kinda bugged me a bit?

Obviously I get why they wouldn't just have Takumi responsible for killing a whole bunch of Mari's old classmates, but the way this plays out now, it feels less like Mari is getting over her biases and more like 'hey it turns out I was just mistaken and never had any reason to be afraid of Takumi after all'. I wished her inevitable coming-around to Takumi would have been more remembering how close they've gotten over the last 30+ episodes and that becoming more powerful than her fears stemming from the past. Again though, maybe actually making Takumi responsible for her trauma would be too much, even if it was something like him going berserk due to a full moon or something, so I understand this decision.