Second series review of the summer, and the B-side is definitely nothing like yesterday’s single.  I referred to Kanata no Astra as “a perfect little self-contained whole”, but that description sure doesn’t apply to Given.  Astra was an ideal fit for its schedule (thanks to its clever use of double-episodes and OP/ED cutting).  It had a beginning, middle and end – a real rarity for TV anime these days.  If you were any sort of fan at all, the conclusion probably left you feeling pretty darn satisfied (I know it did me).

Then we have Given.  For lack of a more delicate way of putting it, it was a music series with almost no music and a romance series that ended just as the romance took its first halting steps.  For from a conclusion, the ending felt barely like an ending at all, but a segue.  To be fair it at least avoids abjectly going the “now read the manga” route, since there was a simultaneous announcement of a film coming in 2020.  That’s a bit of a cheat – a series should still attempt to deliver some sort of closure in my opinion – but I suppose it’s better than nothing.

Still, Given was remarkably entertaining when taking all that into consideration.  For all that I’m frustrated at how little it actually delivered over 11 episodes, I do respect its consistency.  It never made any pretense to be something it wasn’t, which is great except there were a lot if times I wished it was.  What sucks is that what little music and romance we did get suggests that the series could have been very good at delivering more, but since it didn’t all that mostly amounts to a tease.

While we didn’t get much of a look at what that actually looks like, we did get conformation that Ritsuka and Mafuyu are now a couple.  Part and parcel of that involves the Fleetwood Mac effect, and Ritsuka knows band dynamics enough to know that entering into a romantic relationship with a bandmate is fraught with peril (not to mention he denounced it louder than anyone else to Haruki and Aki).  It’s probably tougher for Haruki to be a hardass about this than it might otherwise be, though, given that he’d like to be dating Aki himself.  He does scold the boys to keep their relationship a secret though – a concession to the demands of trying to be popular (there’s something just a bit ugly about that, but Given doesn’t dwell on it).

The extremely low-key way this series goes about things can be a blessing and a curse, but in terms of this aspect I think it’s the former.  Shows that depict male-male relationships in a straightforward way without resorting to histrionics or genre tropes are still an extreme rarity in anime, so I appreciate very much that Mafuyu and Ritsuka’s relationship could hardly be more normal.  Two 16 year-olds deciding to be in a romance – awkward, halting, intermittently giddy and terrifying (for Ritsuka), and the fact that they’re both boys does nothing to derail that.

Indeed, there’s a sense that going forward the Haruki-Aki side of the narrative might become equally or even more important.  As young adults, their relationship – with its built-in complicating factors – in many ways seems to hold even more dramatic potential.  Of course if we only got the pre-appetizer where Ritsuka and Mafuyu are concerned, we barely got to look at the menu with Haruki and Aki.  I suppose the movie is going to touch on that storyline (the trailer certainly suggests that).

As for Given (the band), that’s ultimately perhaps my biggest disappointment with Given (the show).  I love stories about bands and being in them, and I love on-screen depictions of rock music.  There was a so much charm to scenes like the surprise party in this episode – these guys have great chemistry as a band, and their music wasn’t half bad either.  Again it’s that to thine own self be true thing – Given just wasn’t going to be the sort of series that really explored the band experience in depth, and it never pretended otherwise.  If my assumptions were wrong that’s on me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I did enjoy the series less as a result.

All in all Given was a nice showing for NoitaminA, which seems to be batting about .500 these days.  And any series that brings us closer to mainstream romance anime being more diverse is a positive in my book.  It’s a series that did a lot of things really well, though I think it suggests the potential inherent in its premise and cast more than it actually delivers on it.  Sometimes that’s the adaptation, sometimes the source material itself never gets past that point.  Whichever it is with Given, the anime is what it is – a generally charming and entertaining effort that leaves you wishing it had been even more.