I KNEW he wasn’t perfect!

To be honest I’m not really sure I was planning to blog this series. But it’s a slow day – not much happening as we wait for arguably my two most anticipated premieres of the season tomorrow, Noitamina’s Fractale and Huorou Musuko.

So let me get this straight – we waited for two seasons for some sign of imperfection from Mr. Perfect Kazehaya and this is it – that he wet the bed as a six year-old? What a disappointment! I’d really hoped he used to strangle puppies, or got kicked out of his elementary school for bullying, or something. Anything to add some flavor to this plain yogurt.

I will give credit to this show for the fact that it can sort of make me care about really unimportant things. The whole labor about the chocolates was trivial at best, but by the end I was really rooting for Sawako to give him the damn things. It’s hard for me to believe people rip on Masahiro and Azuki from Bakuman, yet fawn all over this couple. At least Masahiro and Azuki have declared their relationship, even if it’s a bizarre one. These two don’t seem to know what they have – everyone else in the school knows they’re a couple, but they can’t even exchange a box of chocolates or give up the pretense that they’re just friends. It’s frustrating, to the point that I care one way or the other – though really, I’m mostly watching at this point in hopes of seeing the much more interesting Ryu and Yoshida get some screen time. They’re in denial of their relationship too, but at least they do things as a couple.

It may not be fair, but I can’t help but compare this to the likes of Bokura ga Ita and Sand Chronicles, shoujo romances where things that matter actually happen. I know that’s not what KnT is trying to be – this is a real slice-of-life romance and normally, I love slice-of-life. I guess I like my shoujo with a little more spice and a little less sugar – as good as the show is at making incredibly banal things marginally involving, there’s only so much I can care about trivialities. That’s why the series seems to be at it’s best when dealing with weightier matters that generally don’t involve the main characters – Yoshida’s painful crush on Ryu’s older brother or Kurumi’s stalking, for example. It’s not unusual for supporting characters to be more interesting than the leads, of course – happens all the time – but when the leads dominate the narrative as much as these do, it does detract from my overall enjoyment of the series.