So... I'll admit to being a little off-topic, but seeing as how the questions asked by the OP seem to be fairly well answered, I don't really feel guilty over it. However, I wanted to address some posts made on the previous page...

Razara wrote:

As much as I love Juri, I loved her a lot more when I had sympathy for her. I assume that I must be looking at things the wrong way, but when I look at her, I don't see a tragic victim, I see a spoiled teenager. Not quite in the Nanami sense, but in a different way.

It's just that she reminds me of a lot of kids my age. She has a good life, but she has no appreciation for it whatsoever. She's rich, beautiful, talented, but she acts as though her life is horrible, and she has no reason to live. Yes, there are a lot of people who have good reasons to hate their lives, such as an abusive family or something along that line, but ask a teenager why they hate their life, and half the time they can't give you a good reason. At least that's how it is with the kids at my school. Hell, I was like that myself once, to an extreme extent.

I just don't think that her moping around is justified. There are tons of people who are worse of then her, but, no. They could never understand how she feels. The girl she loves doesn't know her feelings (ZOMG) and the same girl betrayed her. Obviously, this is enough to upset anyone, but after three years, she should have moved on by now. I want Shiori too, but can't have her, and I don't care even the slightest bit. I've had people I cared about me betray me, but I got over it. I just don't understand why Juri can't do the same. Why does this one aspect of her life make life not worth living? Why does not having Shiori mean that she should give up on ever being happy again?

I'm not passing judgement on you personally, and I know there were already responses to this, but I see holes in this post... and perhaps a few in the responses to it as well. I understand that this was all a fair while ago, but... well, the point I'm going to raise in this post is one I haven't seen being raised anywhere else, so without further ado... I think there's a side of Juri that appears to have been overlooked by this forum in general. Or maybe I just haven't read enough posts. I could be wrong, even...

Anyway, I think it's underestimated just how much of an emotional investment Juri put into her feelings for Shiori. Shiori said it herself in Episode 17: "Well, I'm not just an old friend, but someone who practically grew up with her. She always protected me. Juri-san was my only friend... " Now, forgive me if I sound opportunistic, perhaps even greedy in painting the picture this way, but I take that to mean that they spent quite a bit of time together as small children. Now here I might be getting a little interpretive, but I think it's possible the effect their friendship had on Juri might have been such that it caused her to become (even if only to a slight degree at best) emotionally withdrawn from anyone and everyone else she had a connection to at that point in her life (such as her relatives...) thus building her emotional anchor to Shiori and rooting it deeper within herself than anyone could have guessed. Now, don't forget that this is happening during their childhood, crucial developmental years and all that... that sort of has it's way of making this kind of thing much more significant than it would be if they had been teenagers at the time they first met.

Another detail to take into account is that "The betrayal" also quite probably happened during a rather crucial time period for both of them, which can be summed up in one word: Puberty. I can't help but think that by that point, Juri hadn't even been aware of her romantic attraction to Shiori for very long, and thus hadn't yet been fully able to sort out how those feelings related to the ones that were already there before... never mind the issue of uh, being a teenager having to come to grips with the whole lesbianism thing on top of that.

This in mind, I believe that I can safely say that by doing what she did at that point in time, Shiori didn't just tear Juri's heart out: she took her entire being and ripped it to shreds. Now, to be perfectly honest, to me that at least puts her character into a much more believable, understandable focus. It doesn't necessarily justify or vilify either of them (I do love that SKU makes it's characters just too well designed for one to really say with certainty who was right and who was wrong) but it does hit pretty damn close to home for me personally, as you can likely tell by all the emphasized words in italics throughout my post. Not that my life is anything like Juri's, but it adds greatly to my sympathy for her.