With Nagatoro back in judo and going hard at it, she doesn’t have much time for Senpai. And she doesn’t need his help anyway, right? Cue the drama as a fellow club member metes out a serious whupping on our heroine. Then the shower hi-jinx you never wanted ensue and the school trip looms.
I have been a Nagatoro apologist and defender more than once, because the series has been pretty dang good at a number of points. This isn’t one of them. Oh, it’s got plenty of moments. But then it has the other moments and they’re not so great.
Senpai keeps stepping up where it counts and he gets some winners here that show why he’d be dating Nagatoro already if his spinal column was at all consistently existent. His slow growth has been fun to watch, especially when it comes to sticking up for himself and others.
His interactions with Nagatoro have come down quite a bit too, in terms of cruelty, and she couldn’t be any more plain about the fact that she likes him (witness their lingering bet and her hissy fit after the school trip planning) at this point.
And then we introduce yet another huge-breasted character and the godawful sexual harassment begins. This shower sequence is uncomfortably exploitative, honestly, featuring a lot of barely obscured Nagatoro for the reader to (presumably) leer at.
Yes, I know, I am reading a book aimed at horny teenagers - I survived all of Good Ending, dammit - but normally Nagatoro has eschewed such flagrant sexuality in favour of, well, slightly less flagrant (or just so extreme it’s impossible to take seriously, in the case of the former art club president).
It’s a bit much. I won’t pretend some of it isn’t funny - the way our leads end up in the wrong showers is actually very amusing because it makes a great point about the importance of good graphic design (making fun of the tropes as you use them is always a good way to get a pass). There’s just a fine line between manga being manga and me feeling like I’ll be put on a list for reading this and it’s perilously close here.
I also love Nagatoro’s nonsensical middle school nickname and how it explains her ridiculous movement powers around Senpai. You wouldn’t expect a story to explain the way it draws things, so that was a really clever bit of business. Nice catch, too, Senpai.
The following school trip arc shows that Senpai can’t present information worth a damn, although I like that his plan has merits, he’s just super bad at making his case. Which leads to massive pushback when Nagatoro and her pals sign up for Senpai’s group (the nonsense justification for how they’re all going on this trip is great just because of how “whatever, we’re doing this” it is).
This section works really well because it shows that for all the progress we’ve seen, there are still a lot of ways to hurt feelings very, very easily. But with some good advice from some unlikely sources, plus playing to his own strengths, the day is saved. Or should that be date? The look in Nagatoro’s eyes here is brilliant.
For me this volume was like eating a pizza with olives. I hate olives. So I would pick them off. But if you miss one and bite into an olive, you’re just going to focus on the taste of what you hated and have a harder time seeing the good stuff around it. The series has done that sort of crass, brazen, comedy before. It just didn’t work for me here this time out.
3 stars - you can’t win ‘em all and, honestly, as time goes on I’m hoping the lingering bad taste will fade and I’ll remember all the good stuff. I still like the story, but it’s been much better and less obvious about its pandering.