When it comes to Dosanko Gal wa Namara Menkoi, I don’t swim with the current to say the least.  It really seems like the manga readers constantly moaning are straight trippin’.  Like, balls.  I just don’t get why they’re so upset.  I don’t even really know whether the basis for most of it is that the series is too beholden to romance tropes, or not enough (I kind of think it’s more the latter).  What do these people want that they’re not getting?  Is this too much of a harem series or not enough of one?

To that, I still contend that it’s not a harem series at all, and that a lot of the problems come from people viewing it through the lens of one.  It’s Minami, period.  I do appreciate that the series paints Rena as a more realistic alternative candidate than Sayuri, just by nature of her relationship with Tsubasa.  And contrasting last week’s episode to this one is a good example of that.  Rena (I guess she does have a leg up in that she’s the first to meet Tsubasa’s dad) and Sayuri are certainly interested, but it’s just not happening.

I do get why the ending of this episode would annoy people, I admit, because it annoyed me a little too.  But it’s a speed bump, nothing more.  The whole ep was obviously building towards something like this, but the bulk of it was Minami making absolutely clear that she sees Tsubasa as her boyfriend already.  She takes him on a three hour journey without telling him why, to Abashiri (no sign of Nopperabou).  Not only that, she covers his eyes for the last stage of the trip.  This is clearly building towards something big.

That something is Higashimokoto Shibazakura Park.  It’s a place famous for blossoms (Hokkaido has a lot of those) but not sakura (sorry, Evergreen Boy).  These are a flowering plant called moss phlox, they share a color scheme with most cherry blossoms, and they are indeed spectacular.  This is her payback, of course, for slow-roll Chad learning her favorite song on the piano.  Minami remembered Tsubasa saying how he missed the cherry blossoms in Tokyo, and brought him to the closest thing northern Hokkaido had handy.

The hints drop like anvils on Wile E. Coyote’s head.  She takes him to a fertility shrine.  She wonders how people around them would see them.  She has him pick out jewelery for her.  She uses a photo of the pair of them together as her new profile pic.  And most blunt of all, she mentions that the pair of them should come back to the shrine “years and years from now”.  Tsubasa does chicken out of making it clear he reciprocates, but he seems about ready to rectify that when Minami drops the bomb she teased last week.  She’s moving abroad, she says, to study beauty.  Inspired by Tsubasa’s sense of responsibility to get serious and better herself.

OK, so that is a sort of an artificial roadblock, but I don’t think it changes anything in the long term.  With the manga ongoing I don’t suppose the anime will have any sort of resolution next week, but I have zero doubts about how this story is going to end and I frankly don’t know why anyone else does either.  And I like Sayuri and Rena fine, so I have no issues seeing them have more interaction with Tsubasa.  I still find this series to be rather sweet and refreshingly low-key in the drama department, and nothing that happened here changes that.