天下制覇

Oh, Japan. Will you ever learn how to do a non-comically overwrought bully?

The other three shows today will have to wait until after work.

Impressions:

I'm tremendously glad this exists as it's a sign that at least someone somewhere in Japan has a bit more of a mature understanding of relationships, puberty, et al than you'd think from the hundreds of thousands of shows displaying absolutely no understanding of either. It also wasted no time in jumping right into charcter driven events instead of wasting time on pointless drivel. Hell, there was even an A plot and a B plot for the episode, and while the period cramps subplot resolved itself well, the other kind of lost control when it took the Popular Girl and her clique of the entire classroom's worth of girls, and the only way the director seemed to know how to show this was to frame her as a comically evil murderer or something.

I made the comparison to Kodocha in the season preview, and I'll stick by it. It's full of all the usual visual cliches of bubbly backgrounds and not-great production, but it's a character driven romance that covers more ground and establishes deeper relationships in its first episode than most 'romance' or drama shows aimed higher do in entire seasons. Probably as an artifact of being aimed at a younger audience, it also veers towards cute instead of screaming for the punchlines, which is welcome. I'm pretty sure that it'll now stagnate or get extremely frustrating without going forward, but like B-Gata, it has plenty of material to work with that Japanese media rarely touches, both humorous and dramatic. It's definitely not as strong an opening as that had though, and I think it's probably a bit too innocent to actually get particularly funny.

All that said, I'm still kind of meh on the whole thing. It's a show about preteens hemming and hawwing over puberty for god's sake. Still, it does what it set out to do on the package, doesn't waste time with obnoxious padding or annoy with screaming, characters are solid and it's focused on their interactions, and aside from the bully thing towards the end, there weren't any major missteps.

Next Episode:

That hair bun bothers me immensely.