The question with Tsurezure Children for me isn’t so much whether or not I blog it (though there were a couple of slightly troubling signs this week, I’m not too worried about that) but whether I do so as part of a digest or in its own posts.  Shorts are somewhat difficult to write full posts on, and this series is half-length and includes an OP.  I’m not sure why it is to be honest – with this vignette format a full episode would be easy peasy, so maybe there’s not enough manga material – but that’s a moot point.  I’ll give it another couple of weeks and see how I’m feeling about it.

Any series that takes this kind of in-episode omnibus format is inevitably going to have some characters (and in this case, couples) who make more of an impression.  It’s also going to post quite a challenge in keeping the characters straight, especially early – to be honest I’m not even going to bother trying with names.  We rejoin the narrative this week with the class rep and the troll, whose intro I rather liked – but their arclet takes an unwelcome turn with the introduction of a brocon lolimouto, which is pretty much a guaranteed annoyance even if she is played by Tomatsu Haruka.  Throw in the fact that imouto might have yandere tendencies too and this pairing (or triangle) spells Tsurezure Children’s biggest potential problem so far.  Obviously this series is going to explore teenage romance tropes systematically, I get that (can the osananajimi and stalker be far behind?) but that’s a narrative road fraught with danger.

Next up is the genki astronomy club girl who was in love with her now-graduated sempai.  She’s now trying to recruit first-years, and the boy in the line of fire is a blasé sort who bemoans that he doesn’t really care about anything.  Somehow or another he convinces himself by the end of her botched sales pitch that he likes her – or is at least interested.  As for the contact lens girl and the majime boy who helps her look for her lost lens, that’s an odd one – even by the end of it I still wasn’t sure if he was confessing to her or not.

The final chapter of the week is the meatiest one, in which we find a guy who loans his umbrella to the girl he likes and then follows her onto her bus in order to confess.  Much of the theme of Tsurezure Children seems to involve the adolescent failure to communicate – the difficulty in saying what you mean to say to the person you like.  But the girl in this pairing sums up another very common theme in early teen psychology – “anyone who’d confess to me must have something wrong with them”.  Even when umbrealla boy confesses, she chalks it up to his feeling sorry for her – and he’s too beaten down to argue.  This one has real depth and intrigue, and looks to be a situation well worth keeping an eye on.