And we return to our favorite YD Teacher Kagami. What student problem do we have today? Let’s just cut through all the intro stuff and jump right in.
So the episode starts up with the irritable student council chick telling Kagami that she has a list of students who aren’t coming to school and she needs him to go basically force them to come to class. He tells her however that he can’t as he’ll be too busy picking up a new manga in Akihabara.
After he races off and picks up a copy he sees a gothic lolita clad girl sitting outside the shop counting the people that come out with a copy of the manga.
They quickly get into a debate over who is more of a fan of that particular manga and Kagami wins.
To prove she’s the number one fan she takes Kagami back to her apartment to show him all sorts of framed uncirculated art and figures to which she reveals that she is actually the artist of the manga. He doesn’t believe her at first until she draws a picture of the characters on the wall with her finger.
She then gets a call from her editor saying that they need the new preview of her newest manga by tomorrow. Unfortunately she doesn’t have any motivation to draw her next brother/sister love manga.
Yeah….you can see where this is going.
Kagami calls over his sister and begins to tell her how he discovered they’re not really brother and sister, telling her how he’s relieve and goes in to kiss her.
And…for a few moments, this actually begins to work.
They then reveal that it was all just to help the artist get pumped up. and….the sister isn’t too happy. Albeit, she does help her color in the manga until the next morning.
Fed up with Kagami not doing his job, the student council leader sends Kagami the list of truant students on his cell and low and behold, the manga artist girl is one of them. She however says that she doesn’t want or need to go back as she’s making a living drawing manga and it’s what she wants to do.
When she asks if Kagami wants to bring her back to school, he responds with “Dear god no, keep drawing the manga.”
It’s when the student council girl insists on her coming back, that’s when Kagami’s lesson begins. His idea is to convince the manga girl to come to class to use the student council girl as the subject for her next manga and stalk her mercilessly until she leaves her alone. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work as she really just does want her to come back.
After Kagami thinks things between the two have been resolved, they both reveal to him that the manga girl is going to prove how the school is useless while the student council girl is going prove the opposit and Kagami will be the judge. And that’s where the episode ends.
This was actually a very fun episode. There were a few things in this episode that really worked and kept me hooked for the whole thing. Firstly, I liked the manga girl. She’s a bit stoic, but she has an aire of royalty but also indignation. She knows what she wants and just wants to be left with what makes her happy. She’s not inherently wrong with this, so it kind of blends the line. Yeah she’s a high school aged girl, but at the same time, she’s doing something she loves and is making money and people are happy because of what she’s doing. Does she really HAVE to go to school?
At the same time there were some genuinely funny moments. The near kiss scene with the brother and sister was, at least in my eyes, very amusing. Also, the fact that Kagami beat the manga’s own author at a trivia contest about that title was pretty damn funny as well.
My computer glitched up a few times while watching the episode and I actually got annoyed I couldn’t keep watching it, so that’s always a good sign.
As the series is progressing, Kagami’s staying the same character he’s always been, but we learn more and more about him. How he actually does care, just about the things he likes and in his own way. But every time he’s come across a student, there’s always been a clear problem. One girl was getting bullied, another guy was antisocial, a girl had no confidence on being herself, but this is the first time that I actually couldn’t tell which side they were trying to portray as being better. It was a blurred line and I think they played it nicely. The series has been improving over the past episodes and i’m very interested in continuing this show until the end.
Episode 8/10
-Hideki