Week after week this series makes my face hurt.

It’s fitting I suppose given how how this series is basically a retelling of the mangaka’s own adolescence, but Karakai Jouzu no Takagi-san really excels at observational storytelling.  All of the little vignettes this week cast some light on that, starting with the “Detour” trilogy.  It’s manga material but yet again, the anime manages to give it a lot more stick.  It’s almost like magic at this point the way the adaptation manages to exceed the limiters of the material week after week, elevating it to levels I never imagined this series was capable of reaching.

The side trip chapters tell a lot about the different sorts of couples you find in adolescence, for starters.  You have the “in denial” pairing, where Nishikata’s mind isn’t yet ready to process that he’s basically Takagi’s fiancee and she’s too shy (yes) to force him to confront it.  You have the Houjou-Hamaguchi couple, hilariously tsun-tsun.  They’re one step above the “throwing spitballs at the kid they like” stage.  And then the Mano-Nakai “official” couple, to the awe of their classmates (though this isn’t always as satisfying for Mano as she’d like it to be).

The third part of this triad isn’s necessarily romantic, but it’s no less keenly observational about kids this age.  To wit, the great gap in outlook they have – some see themselves as mini-adults, and some are content being children.  Yukari lives in a fantasy world, a 13 year-old’s idea of what adulthood is like, and is desperate to drag Sanae and Mina (who are totally disinterested) along with her.  It’s so much fun watching these seven children interact with the “415 steps” legend (lordy, how the Japanese love numerical puns) each in their own, true-to-themselves way.  There can be no greater insult to a Japanese middle-schooler than “kodomo-poi”, but it still fits them like a glove.

As ever the anime saves the “progress” chapter for last, and it’s another anime-original (edit: no it isn’t…)  entry.  While all of those have been excellent some of them have felt quite distinct from manga canon in tone, but that’s not the case here.  “Rental DVD” plays very much like a manga chapter, albeit with high stakes.  It’s worth noting that while DVD rental places still exist here (Tsutaya does it in a few locations) they’re rare – this segment fits into the narrative of Karakai Jouzu as a memoir of Yamamoto-sensei’s own youth on Shodoshima (which would have placed this chapter in the late ’90s, when such places where omnipresent).

I love this bit for the way it shows us how far Nishikata and Takagi have really come.  Nishi is so himself – bubbling over with enthusiasm and spoiling the movie for Takagi, then miserable with guilt over it.  There’s almost no teasing here – she could make him suffer for his childishness, but she doesn’t.  In fact she actively tries to make him feel better, and chooses a movie she (rightly) thinks he’ll love.  It’s another example of the way the anime-original material emphasizes (and yes, accelerates) the progress of the relationship but does so in a way that feels organic to the source.

The one respect in which this chapter does feel “different” is where it depicts Takagi admitting she’s continually passing up chances to formalize things with Nishikata-kun because she’s still too scared to do so.  I don’t think this is news if you watch closely – Takagi often betrays the cracks in her unassailable facade, though Nishikata never notices them.  What the anime sometimes does is take what’s implicit and make it explicit – more often through Nishi’s behavior but occasionally (as here) Takagi’s.  I think the series is better for it myself, but it’s a testament to the dexterity of the anime that almost no manga readers seem to feel differently.