Hoeru making sure to eat all the food Mine made for him really gets me.
'Cause, where does a freshly resurrected missing person get ingredients? Mine probably had to go to a lot of trouble to get all that food, but chose to use her limited time on it. Based on what she said, reminiscing about how young Hoeru was when they ended up in the No One World, she has a lot of unspoken regrets about her inability to protect and care for him back then. Those foods she made are probably all things she wished to be able to feed him ten years ago. Keeping a child in an alien world alive was probably hard enough, but she probably also had to watch him go hungry, and blamed herself for being unable to provide anything...Mine's situation was probably a bit similar to Shouma's mom in that way. Mine probably also wished she could feed Hoeru proper meals, right? So when she was temporarily revived, the first thing she did, before even going to see Hoeru, was make sure she had food for him to eat... I'm glad Hoeru didn't let any of it go to waste, and that Hoeru understood all that without anything needing to be said... I really like Gozyuger's refusal to rely on narration and character thoughts to get stuff like that across, instead focusing on character actions and camera work to convey it.
And then there's the brilliant contrast between Mine and Kuon, in how they react to seeing Hoeru all grown up and surrounded by friends. It seems like Kuon is frustrated that Hoeru was able to survive without him, but Mine is clearly relieved Hoeru was able to keep going without her. And while Kuon revels in Hoeru being devoid of wants and aspirations, Mine felt terrible guilty for it and upon being resurrected, the only thing she wanted to do was tell Hoeru it's okay to want things.
What's also intriguing about that is the writing doing some interplay between the feelings of caretaking and the feelings of romance, right? Kuon and Mine were both caretakers of Hoeru when he was a child, but over the course of ten years, the feelings got muddled. Mine clearly didn't have any romantic feelings to Hoeru, just pride and relief in seeing the child she used to care for as a strong adult, but Hoeru's feelings for her probably became "romantic" over time, as he been surviving using her idealized memory and her traumatic death to keep himself going. She was his first love. Meanwhile, Kuon's feelings for his little brother have gotten all twisted up, because he's been using his own idealized idea of Hoeru to keep himself going. I'm curious to see where that thread is leading.
But most interesting: Kuon really thought he could break Hoeru by giving back Mine and killing her again, but it didn't even crack Hoeru. Like Kuon pointed out, he didn't even cry. Hoeru is so used to his life being a complete tragedy that such an extreme act of cruelty by his own older brother couldn't even stagger him this time. In a way that is more animalistic than human, Hoeru is beyond angst and self-pity. Those feelings are so mundane to him that they just slough off him like water.
While looking up what the heck the imagery of this episode met, I found an article discussing how hydrangeas are the flower of Japan's rainy season (aka June), and how they invoke a "beautiful figure enduring the long season of rain", which seems awfully fitting. That's the kind of character Hoeru is.