Well, that utterly wrecked me, but I knew it would.  If BokuYaba gets a second season there are about 20 moments off the top of my head that will do that.  I can’t help but obsess over what a crime against decency it will be if that doesn’t happen, because this series really is just that good.  And as great as this season is, it’s only an appetizer – what comes after it will end is a feast fit for the Gods.  One tries not to let their hopes run unchecked, even if the signs overall look pretty good, but I’m going to agonize over it until we know for sure.  Which sucks if it doesn’t happen, because when the hell does that moment come?

Is it a date?  Of course it’s a date.  And for my money probably the best first date in animanga.  The superlatives fly with this series to the point where they sound like hyperbole, but for me it’s not – that’s legit how I feel.  From the moment Anna set all this up by “forgetting” to bring the manga to school this was absolute classic stuff.  All the awkwardness, all the cuteness, all the sexual tension.  I admit I didn’t have a first date in middle school, but they never get all that much easier when you’re the sort of person Ichi describes himself as late in the episode.

Ichi arrives early of course – to Shibuya, where kids from Meguro go for their big city outings.  And they meet at Hachiko because that’s where you always meet in Shibuya..  But Anna is early too, which Kyou doesn’t quite know how to process (“maybe she’s running errands?”).  And his mask-hood look is not exactly making the best initial impression, though once she recognizes him her mask falls away instantly.  It’s Christmas Eve, it’s Shibuya, and it’s all too much for Kyou to process.  This is so far outside his previous range of experience that he has no way to contextualize it.

It strikes me that there’s a fundamental dichotomy  between these two where the relationship is concerned.  Anna pretends she doesn’t know things for Kyou’s benefit, and he convinces himself he doesn’t understand things because they don’t fit his worldview.  For Anna this is indisputably their first date, planned to the letter.  For Ichi, well…  He knows Anna is not running errands, just like he knew she wasn’t the sort of girl who’d use him to scare off Nanjou and throw away.  But he’s so convinced of his own unattractiveness and undesirability that his coping mechanism is to try and make incongruous facts fit that reality.  Anna’s challenge, in a sense, is to break down that wall of denial.

This applies to stuff like his fashion sense, too.  Ichi’s is actually a pretty sharp dresser – he’s got the drip – but he’s convinced himself he’s lame.  He understands a lot about fashion instinctively, to the point where Anna is taken aback by it.  His comments about the stuff she tries on are spot-on.  There are a lot of amazing Norio moments leading up to that, like that “holding handles” routine – a very ingenious way to bypass the embarrassment of first-date intimacy.  And Anna slipping up and dropping her charade occasionally – like when she made that comment about their line-waiting conversation not being awkward like it usually is on a first date.

Poor Kyou, in the sense that he realizes he’s not fulfilling the classic male role in this scenario at all.  He lets Anna stand in front of him in line on the stairs (I’m not even sure why that’s a thing) – though in reality, she likes the feeling of him being a little taller than her.  She chooses everywhere they go, she orders at the cafe, and she even pays the bill.  And then there’s that elephant in the room, the difference in their physical stature.  None of this is easy for a guy (especially this age) to deal with, and Kyou keeps a running tab in his head of all the ways he’s dropping the ball.  Yet somehow Anna seems to be having a great time, another thing he tries hard to convince himself he’s not actually seeing when he knows he is.

From pancake cafe to boutiques, Kyou is indeed largely a passenger here, though at least he has some experience tagging along with his sister to fall back on.  When Kana actually shows up at the boutique though, that puts him on tilt.  Kyou is not ready for Kana to see him like this, even if Anna would surely love to blow his cover and put the onus on him to reconcile the truth.  She bails him out, pulling him into the stall with her as Kana goes into the next one (there’s a hilarious part of this sequence – Chapter 47 – that the anime sadly cut).  That poses its own set of challenges of course – Ichi’s imagination was already making his life difficult, reality kicks it up a notch – but he (again) manages to say exactly the right thing: “It looks good on you”.

Brick by brick that wall is coming down, and Kyou’s “not yet” about telling Onee is a pretty major admission on his part.  But it’s hard to imagine a more significant moment than Kyou opening up to Anna about himself – about how he’s “not a people person”, and is always willing to say no to invitations and call a spade a spade.  That’s as vulnerable as we’ve ever seen him make himself, and he’s doing it to let Anna know how important this day was to him.  All the rest is pure feels – the (real, this time) hand-holding, the Christmas illumination, her tenderly putting her scarf around his neck.  There’s a long way to go here – Ichi still has so many hills to climb – but this marks a major step on the journey.

The moments that really get to me are when Kyou reacts before he can think, and his true joy at being with Anna shows on his face.  His struggle is so real (if you know, you know) and ultimately, that’s what makes BokuYaba so powerful an experience.  There is a great sequence (Chapter 49) we don’t get here but I suspect it’s only deferred (to Episode 12).  And we do get the first appearance of Lucifer Nigorikawa in his true role – Ichi’s alter ego.  He’s got many great moments ahead of him if we see a second season – just one more reason to fervently hope that happens.