That was a title I was really hoping not to have to use this week.  I’m pretty much always hoping that with these series review posts, but with Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta I thought there was a real chance I wouldn’t have to.  I still think a sequel is possible here, given that the manga is pretty popular and the anime has been well-received in Japan.  Content could be a concern, as this season used two-thirds of the manga chapters.  But the remaining ones are a lot denser and more story-driven, so I think it could work.  We’ll just have to wait and hope.

What’s undeniable for me is that the anime hasn’t covered the best material yet.  It’s given us a taste of it, but only a taste.  A lot of seeds planted in these 13 episodes bear fruit later in the story, and it really blossoms in terms of complexity and emotional heft.  It’d certainly be a shame if we don’t get to see that in anime form.  It would also be weird to produce an anime adaptation of a manga as it was wrapping up and then stop in the middle, but weird and production committees go hand in hand so it hardly beggars possibility.

As for this final episode, there wasn’t a whole lot of effort to give it an aura of finality.  It was a straight adaptation of a couple of manga chapters, admittedly one of them being kind of a transitional one.  The one concession the anime made was adding an original twist (leastwise I don’t remember it) where Kaede met Ai when they were kids.  It’s intended to sort of frame the developments of the first 12 episodes, and it’s fine in that respect, though I personally don’t feel like it changes things in any material way.

There’s some innocent mutual fetishizing going on here, with Ai insisting that Kaede try on her “fashion glasses” (from the field trip), which she’s accidentally brought to school in place of her prescription ones.  She orders Kaede to take a selfie and send it to her, but then finds her glasses inside the case for the fakes, and is so enchanted she demands Kaede wear them all day.  He returns the favor when she gets her hair tied up in a pony-tail, which he rather obsessively latches onto immediately.

Later, Ai runs into a “friend” from elementary school, who turns out to be a kid who regularly bullied her over her glasses.  She notes that “dad-like” Kaede is the complete opposite, which is a left-handed compliment for a guy in his position to be sure.  It’s nice to be needed but Komura-kun worries about where he stands when Mie-san no longer needs him (assuming she ever gets to that point).  It’s obvious to us that her feelings for him go a lot deeper than that, but he’s a kid and too close to the situation to see the forest for the trees.

That’s the gist of all this, really – summer is coming, entrance exams are around the corner, and a relationship defined to Ai’s forgetfulness and the school building understandably feels fragile.  The playground is where a lot of leaps forward for these two seem to happen, and this is no exception.  The pair of them didn’t kiss inside that slide, but they did everything but.  Kaede’s declaration that he wants to see Ai’s cute face the next day pretty much boils down to a confession as far as I’m concerned.  Although in point of fact that could be said of a few interactions between them already.

The next bit, frustratingly, is where things start to get really good.  The parents get more involved, everything about the story gets deeper and more complicated.  As I said last week, This first half of the story is really a chronicle of self-awareness and the lack of it, where the second half is more about what one does with it once they acquire it.  The first is interesting but the second even more so, and it’s where Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta really shows its chops.  It would suck if anime-onlys never get to see that.

Lastly, we have the elephant in the room, GoHands.  To say I was trepidatious going into the anime is an understatement; after its first five minutes I was utterly dismayed.  But I’ll be damned if they didn’t kind of get it done.  After that rush of vertigo in the premiere the GoHands weirdness mostly disappeared, and in fact a lot of the series looked really good (especially Ai’s hair).  The greatest accomplishment of the adaptation was that it got Mie-san down perfectly – Wakayama Shion nailed the performance, she was drawn beautifully, and all the little quirks that make her so utterly adorable came across splendidly.

The biggest failing?  Komura-kun wasn’t quite right.  The manga version is sweeter and more dignified – the anime played up the pervy moments and the internal freak-outs for comic effect.  And that’s no small failing – Kaede is the main character, and while his depiction here wasn’t disastrously wrong, it didn’t do him justice the way it did justice to Ai.  That’s a shame, but in the big picture, this adaptation ended up being way better than I expected.  I can honestly say I won’t reject futute GoHands titles sight unseen (for now at least), and that’s a statement I thought I’d never make.  We’ve seen four of my favorite romcom manga get anime in the past two seasons alone, and this was the one I had the least confidence about – but in the end, Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta was a real pleasure.