I agree . A lot of character development and theme structure that at times felt intentionally set up are now starting to feel like they ' re being swept under the rug in favor of source material . For Kumiko , Reina is something of a device for her passion , much like her Hibike ep . 8 s sister was shown to be for her when she was younger in the latest episode of s 2 . In the very first scene of the first season , Kumiko is utterly confused by seeing Reina upset by their results . Reina had seemingly boundless aspirations and passion , something which Kumiko clearly lacked . A huge part of the first season is all about her finding passion , climaxing in the scene where she shouts at Shuuichi that she wants to improve . But one of the big things that was emphasized in season 1 was that her passion was directly inspired by Reina . Seeing how bad the current school ' s band was did not spark any passion in her , and neither did her friends pushing her into rejoining band . Shuuichi certainly did not bring out her passion in anyway . Any mention of him is met with Kumiko ' s disinterest , or sometimes disdain . As you mentioned in an earlier post , Shuuichi ' s seemingly one purpose so far was to highlight Kumiko ' s complacency with everything , and contrast it to the passion that Reina brings out of her . When Reina mentions to Kumiko that she wants to be superlative , Kumiko , seemingly from nowhere , decides she wants the same . It seems fairly reasonable to infer that Kumiko didn ' t come up for this ambition for herself , but aspires for it because Reina does as well . You could say that Kumiko doesn ' t necessarily want to surpass all others like Reina , but rather that she doesn ' t want to be left behind , mirrored by her shock and frustration of being told not to play the measure that she was having difficulty with in practice . She wants to be worthy of standing next to Reina she wants to be her equal rather than looking down from below , but she can ' t keep up to Reina if she stays complacent . She wants to face and overcome challenges and opposing forces alongside Reina , which is already a fairly romantic notion in a liberal sense of the word , but establishing at least some kind of romantic connection from Kumiko to Reina would mirror this sense of overcoming expectations and complacency , especially with Japan ' s modern views of homosexuality . Not only do I feel like Kumiko ' s and Shuuichi ' s relationship is currently completely vapid , which feels actually intentional from a narrative point of view , but I feel like a romantic relationship between them would actually invalidate a lot of the growth that Kumiko went through in the first season . On top of that , Kumiko and Shuuichi have not had one romantic or extremely meaningful interaction together . The only ones that can even be considered to coming close were elicited by Reina in the first place . I can ' t really see a good reason to pair Shuuichi and Kumiko up at the moment and it comes off as really heteronormative to me . I ' m really hoping at the very least KyoAni doesn ' t end the anime with them together . If the novel does it better , that ' s fine , but I just can ' t see it working at all in the anime . I initially got kind of excited when I heard KyoAni was adapting Kobayashisan chi no Maid DragonsanChinoMaidDragon because I had already read a few of the first chapters before it was announced , and knew that one of the main characters was basically outright gay . I thought it might be a sign that KyoAni might start leaning away from more baity stuff and might actually adapt something that ' s full on yuri . What was really exciting about this was not the fact that more yuri was going to be animated although that ' s pretty cool in itself as long as it takes itself seriously unlike Sakura Trick or Valkyrie Drive , no offense to fans of those just not my cup of tea , but that it might ' ve meant that there was possibly a glimmer of hope for KyoAni to follow up on what they had seemingly been building up towards in all of the first season of Hibike . After all , if they were planning to adapt a dedicated yuri manga next season , what would be stopping them from implementing actual yuri in their current project ? After reading everything of Maid Dragon that ' s been translated up to this point however , the manga may appear to be overtly yuri at first , but turns out to be surprisingly baity itself in my opinion . It hits a weird line of appearing really gay while having out of place heteronormative opinions and circumstances . Pretty gray area for me overall , which is kind of concerning considering KyoAni ' s reputation for baiting . At the point the manga ' s currently at , I was personally pretty convinced that there was never going to be an explicitly romantic conclusion for the main characters . In the end , not sure whether it ' s going to allow KyoAni to evolve and branch out , or if it ' s just going to dig them into a deeper trench . Anyways , I ' m not really sure where I was going with all of that . It ' s probably a huge , rambling mess , but I should probably just go to sleep .