Rottcodd

That was very sweet.

Nice to see a chapter focused on Himemiya - most of what we’ve seen of her so far has just been innuendo about her… um… predatory approach to men. Which we still saw here, but with some interesting and touching context.

Well that’s boring.

Oh well. Thanks for the clarification.

The look on her face in the last panel just breaks my heart.

I know it’s a cliche, but I still laugh at that bit when the male lead is made to look embarrassing in a room full of girls, then the next panel is just the “click, click, click, click…” of pictures being taken.

Sure enough.

I wonder why they chose to just ignore that entirely. Why didn’t they have Romelia narrate her thoughts?

I just read through the first few chapters of the manga, and yeah - not only are there all sorts of details provided by Romelia’s thoughts (like what she actually did in the hero’s party and why she wasn’t particularly surprised when Henri broke off the engagement, both of which are revealed early in chapter 1, but still haven’t even been addressed in the anime) - there are little bits and pieces expressed through the thoughts of multiple characters all the way through it. And none of it’s in the anime.

I really wonder what they were thinking. It just seems too dumb of a decision to have made it all the way through production.

Ah well…

I might have to give the manga a try.

I really wanted to like this series, but I just couldn’t manage to stick with it any longer, and specifically because there’s almost no context for anything. We got the bare outline of the climax of her backstory, with the fight against the supposed demon king and the aftermath, when she was accused (apparently correctly) of hiding and not fighting and was summarily dumped by the prince, then much later we got that one flashback of some family apparently being killed by somebody for some reason, and… that’s it pretty much. Other than that, it’s just been her mostly silently forging ahead with whatever her plan is for whatever reason.

With no context, it just all seems arbitrary, and I can’t find any reason to care one way or another.

From what you’re saying, it sounds like the problem is not only that they dropped her internalized running commentary from the adaptation, but that they didn’t replace it with something else, so not only is it gone, but all of the context it provided is gone too.

And if these first three episodes are anything to go by, it’s not coming along later (which is what I had been vainly hoping for with this episode in particular) - it’s just gone.

That seems like a surprisingly boneheaded directorial decision.

This is really cute and promising. I’m a sucker for fluff with a strange twist.

Thanks for sharing it.

I predict that somewhere behind the scenes, an anime adaptation of this is being planned, and it’s going to be awesome.

I tend to forget, because there are a number of really good romance series going right now, but every time a new chapter comes out I’m reminded, this really is the best of them all.

My money’s on the blush.

She seems to have simply not realized how close they’ve gotten, and more to the point what that means. And now suddenly, faced with the awkward truth via Lulu and her other two friends, she’s gone into a sort of panicked shutdown. But it can’t last.

I’ve recently been reading Maigo ni Natteita Youjo wo Tasuketara, Otonari ni Sumu Bishoujo Ryuugakusei ga Ie ni Asobi ni Kuru you ni natta Ken ni tsuite (aka About the Time I Helped Find a Beautiful Exchange Student’s Lost Little Sister) and it’s quite good too, but yeah - this one somehow really nails that whole dynamic.

If it stays true to form, she’s about to meet someone who’s more or less as awkward as she is, though likely in a completely different way

You and me both honestly. I’ve been following this one for a while now and I know full well what it’s really about, but still I sort of stumble over that title - just two more letters in the middle of that “futari” and we’d have a completely different sort of a series.

I generally prefer Romaji titles, especially when they’re as short as this one, but maybe I should start using the English equivalent…

The last few chapters have been interesting from a writing perspective. It strikes me that they sort of neatly illustrate how it is that tropes can be and so often are sort of disappointing.

That moment after An gave him the cookies was like full-blown tsundere. But in another way, it wasn’t - there’s an important distinction there.

What happened was that, as of a couple of chapters ago, she was so comfortable with him that when she was talking to him about Lulu, she was sitting in the seat directly behind him, leaning forward and sort of draped over the seat next to him, so she was technically only a couple of feet away from him, just chatting and not even thinking about it. Then in the next chapter, after crying over her predictably rejected confession, Lulu asked her how things were going with Shunpei and she got all flustered, then later when she got on the bus, she threw up a wall between them and went and sat by herself. Then again in this chapter, after her friends started teasing her about him, she got all flustered again, then pretty much ignored him completely on the bus. But then when she essentially got backed into offering him some cookies, she covered it up with what was essentially a tsundere attitude.

But even though we ended up at a trope, the way we got there was completely different from most series. Most of the time, what happens is that the author just brings two characters together, then it’s just as if they decide, “Okay - now activate tsundere mode,” and one of them is tsundere, just instantly. But what happened here was that the author actually laid the groundwork through a whole series of events, and one of the characters naturally ended up essentially having a tsundere moment.

And that’s the key. Tropes become tropes because they’re things that make so much sense in context that they occur regularly enough to be recognized. But the problem is that lazy or inattentive writers tend to just jump straight to a trope, and that’s what makes them seem cheap. In this case, the author just related a series of events and An’s emotional response to those events, and naturally ended up at something that could be considered to be an example of a trope.

I guess broadly it could be said that the difference is whether the author starts with the trope and then has the character act in a particular way to fit it, or focuses on the character’s actions and just sort of ends up with something that happens to match a trope. And the difference between those two approaches is how it is that tropes generally seem cheap, in spite of the fact that they aren’t necessarily bad just in and of themselves.

Or something like that…

That’s become one of my favorite themes in this - Iori’s meeting potential friends everywhere she goes, but in every case, they’re both so wrapped up in being awkward that neither of them realize it.