It’s been a general rule of thumb that when I’m really, really keyed up for an anime episode something will come along and mess with my mojo.  Work stress, travel, getting sick, it always seems to be something.  It would be hard to be more keyed up than I am for the school trip arc of Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu.  So naturally I was traveling this weekend – and then the server problems hit.  I waited until I’d watched everything else from Sunday (which is about half my anime week) hoping that would be resolved and I could fully enjoy it.  But at some point I just had to say screw it, because the waiting was torture.

Well, I’m home at least, and able to watch it on my monitor with my sound bar instead of in a hotel room on my iPad.  And for 23 minutes at least, I got to think about something I actually wanted to think about.  This episode had a lot of buildup among manga fans (next week even more).  And it seems there has been some disappointment, because the anime moved some things around.  But in Akagi and Hanada I trust – the changes they’ve made (almost all minor ones) have mostly worked out for the better.  And if ever I was to doubt them, I was worried the anime would cut “CHINPO BATTLE” but those magnificent bastards went and expanded it.  They get it.

It’s not really important for non-manga readers – all that matters is whether this worked for them as presented, and I can’t speak to that.  But for the record, I’d sum it up by saying the anime pulled some comedy forward and pushed some drama back, so that this episode is more of the former and next week will be more the latter rather than both being a pretty even mix.  I’ll be interested to see how Akagi and Hanada stitch the outstanding material together with the adjustments they’ve made, but I don’t see anything in this episode that will cause a problem for the season finale.

Indeed, the catalyst for this is the school trip.  And again indeed, if you’re ever in Nara or Kyoto (especially in Nara, where every tourist is really packed into the same space) in June, you’ll see swathes of junior high kids everywhere.  Kyou actually finds himself looking forward to this trip (despite an embarrassing faux pas around Yamada being such a common name), which is a sign of how far he’s come since we first met him.  So much so that he pulls out the booklet for the school camping trip he “lied his way out of” back when he was a total social outcast.

Anna seeing that brochure during a video call is the main driver of events here.  As it turns out she has a third audition for a part in the “Kimi-Iro Octave” adaptation scheduled for the last day of the school trip.  But when she sees that brochure on Kyou’s bed, she decides on the spot that she’s going to skip it and go on the trip (though she has to turn off her video so he won’t see her crying).  He doesn’t know this of course, though he picks up on some sort of discordant note in her behavior.

That manga has been a major factor in the story in so many ways.  It gave us Nigorikawa of course, and he advises Ichi that the reason Yamada seems distracted is that she plans to kiss him on the last day of the trip, just like what happens in Kimi-Iro Octave Volume 12.  That’s not all Ichi has to worry about either.  He winds up next to Hanzawa-san on the Shinkansen (he gallantly gives up his window seat), and she warns him that Andou-san is on the prowl for a couple to flash mob in Kyoto (she’s cutting up confetti even as they speak).

I try not to get too upset with Kankan, because she is just a kid and she doesn’t realize how much harm her antics cause the people she torments.  But my goodness, what a terrible idea all this is – outing middle-schoolers as a couple and forcing them to confess in public.  Ichi is right to be a little paranoid about this, and that causes him to be more conscious than ever about keeping his distance from Anna in Nara (so much that he abandons her to be swarmed by deer).  And all though this is keeps sensing something is off, that Anna is trying a little too hard to show what a grand time she’s having.

This is where some scenes gets shifted around – the dinner and bath scenes, for starters.  I really am glad they left the dick battle in (and indeed, padded it considerably, no pun intended).   Kyou’s attitude towards public bathing is incredibly authentic to his personality, and it’s such a middle school boy thing, so dumb.  The legend of Ichi-conda is officially born, and meanwhile the girls are doing pretty much exactly what Adachi imagined they were doing.  Ichi and Anna run into each other after their bath, he gets a look at her calendar (K-I O “AD”) when she drops her phone (that’s a theme), and Adachi bails them out from being Panda victims by scaring Anna off with praise for Kyou’s preparedness for battle.

One little change here is that in the manga, Bayashiko spills the beans to Kyou about why Anna is acting off (and he’s disturbed that she still confides in Kobayashi more than him).  Here – and I kind of like this better to be honest – he puts the pieces together on his own.  And his reaction when he sees Anna practicing her scene on her balcony and finally connects the dots is considerably more emotional in the anime version.  Just as she accepted unhappiness for his sake, he’s distraught at the idea that something he did might have made her unhappy.

The big change, frankly, is that Ichi winds up in his awkward spot a full day earlier than he does in the manga.  And it happens before he’s confronted her about what she did for him, which is going to shift the emotions of next week’s events around in interesting ways.  This is one of Norio’s greatest triumphs of physical comedy (which she’s great at generally), with Kyou being mistaken for Chii by More-o’-ya-sensei – which is easy to see, as they look like siblings.  What a predicament for a 14 year-old boy to be in, and only Norio could make it happen in a way that feels so natural.

It’s hard to believe this is almost the end, though the best is still to come.  I remain very hopeful that we will see the rest of the manga animated, but there’ll be time to talk about that next week.  For now I’m just going to revel in how incredible and real this couple is.  BokuYaba is really redefining the teenage romcom in many ways, as I’ve said before – capturing the intricacies of first love from every conceivable angle.  And it looks beautiful from all of them, even the painful ones.