“TairAzuma” has a nice ring to it…

So I’d been assuming – 8 volumes, finished manga, it’s going to get squeezed into one cour and that’s that for You and I Are Polar Opposites. Which would have been OK, if not ideal. But we’re at 8 episodes and the anime has used exactly sixteen chapters, which is easy for a math whiz like me to figure out. The manga has 65 chapters in total so it’s now obvious that the anime is going to blow through less than half of them this season. I guess Seihantai is pretty popular, so I wonder if a second cour is already in the works. When a series is finished, it would be kind of an odd choice to adapt a chunk of it and just stop.

Things are advancing on all fronts. Because Seihantai na Kimi to Boku is a series that advances pretty much all the time, with an irresistible momentum. It actually tackles some pretty weight issues – they certainly feel weighty when you’re in the midst of them. But it does so in such a breezy way that it’s hard to stress over them. Once more the focus splits between the A-couple and the ensemble, but this time it’s not the B but the C-pairing that gets their big push. And once you get a couple nickname, that pretty much makes it official.

As for Yuusuke and Miyu, there are more baby steps to giant strides. Like a first “train date” in uniform, to eat a sweet potato parfait (“Imoden!”). The big news for me, though, is that Miyu is calling Tani-kun “Yuusuke”. As far as I remember there’s been no acknowledgement of this – she just starts doing it, which is the most  Seihantai thing ever (in Bokuyaba Kyou is still calling Anna “Yamada” in Volume 14). There is a callback to this in the final scene as the pair of them muse over what to call each other. But even though this is a big deal in Japan, it’s just not a big deal in this series.

We get a little more MiYuusuke fun, as the pair of them go for photo stickers (no surprises which one of them is comfortable in that environment). But then there’s a big chunk of TairAzuma, which I think has the potential to be my favorite pairing in the series (and I like the other two a lot). They have an “in” here, in that they grew up near each other and attended the same junior high school. This becomes a thing when the group decides to go bowling and Taira panics at seeing a group of their old classmates, not wanting to get drawn into anything.

This is a very interesting couple of scenes for a number of reasons. Azuma-san immediately understands why Taira is stressing (not that he’s ever not) and moves to put his mind at ease (fat chance). It’s become clear that the title refers not just to Tani talking about Suzuki, but the other two couples as well – all three are polar opposite situations. Taira (obviously) thinks too much, about everything. But Azuma thinks too little, and I don’t use that phrase lightly. Taira is worrying over nothing – he’s insignificant to that other group. But Azuma has direct and messy connections to four of them, and really, she should be stressing about it. But even though the group includes an -ex and near -ex, she just lets it be water off a duck’s back.

I don’t think Taira is trying to get Azuma to like him or anything. But he could hardly have found a better way to make an impression than by getting angry on her behalf – urging her to respect herself enough to have hard feelings over being treated shabbily in the past. Yes, it is possible to be too easy-going and Taira – who obviously doesn’t have that problem – may be right to feel Azuma is. He apologizes the next day (and means it) but the impression has already been made, and she’s not looking at him the same way she used to.

We wrap – as always – with the main pairing. With Dad and Oni-chan out Mom suggests Miyu invite the bae over. Yuusuke agrees, and Mom does make a bit a scene but nothing too egregious. As boyfriend material goes Tani makes a good impression – serious, dignified, quiet. The real fun starts when Dad comes home early from his sandlot baseball game (rained out). Especially as he didn’t know Miyu had a boyfriend at all. As to the pair of them in Miyu’s room, it’s really striking how Miyu never has an unexpressed thought, and how totally different (well, polar opposite) she is from Yuusuke in that respect. That doesn’t always work, but the entire framework of this show kind of hinges on the premise that it does.