If you were to ask for my assessment of this adaptation as a manga reader, I honestly think I’d have to say “ask me when it’s over”. Because it all really comes down to what its intentions are, and I still don’t know the answer to that. Hard to believe that’s the case with only four episodes left, but it is what it is. My best guess at this point is that it’s simply going to content itself staying in the one tiny but endearing corner of the manga it’s inhabited so far, making absolutely no effort to even contextualize the larger story. What would that do to my assessment? Hell, I don’t even know whether that would be a good decision or a bad one.
Take Walter (Uchida Yuuma) for example. Not only is he an incredibly important character in all sorts of ways, he’s arguably the most interesting character in the cast. This was literally the first time the anime has even let Uchida-san talk. And ever here, we get a very caricatured and superficial glimpse into his nature. That’s not substantially different from the pacing in the manga, but that’s the manga. What’s the hurry there? By sticking with that the anime makes you ask “why bother introducing Walter at all?” And once you start down that path it’s a very, very slippery slope.
Then we have the circus. Caph mentions it in an extremely offhand way – hell, not even by name, just “the circus” – during her alphabetics lesson with Rob. You’d never know it but that’s a tremendously important setting in the manga, with its own cast and its own subplots. Does it even make sense to give it the most cursory of introductions here? If this is just going to be Bocchan, Alice, and Rob – with a dash of Viola, Caph and Zain – in slice-of-life mode maybe it’s better to just pretend everything else doesn’t exist at all.
Needless to say, I’m conflicted about all this. The interactions of the main trio are really charming, and I like Zain and Caph (though a little Viola goes a long way – I’d prefer a Violetta). The scene with the lesson really showed the characters at their most winning. And while getting yet another flashback sequence (this series is flush with those) may be a little heavy-handed, they are effective at painting the picture of how things got to be the way they are. It’s good that we see that Bocchan used to be an infantile jerk – and to be fair, he had every reason to be. Alice is someone who doesn’t take no for an answer and frankly, that’s what he needed – because he was always going to say no.
The problem is, I want Walter being Walter. I want my Circus Gemini, with all the appealing weirdness that goes along with it. I want the quest to undo the curse in high gear, with all the compelling plot twists that go along with that. But since I’m not going to get those things, is it better to do what the anime is apparently doing and effectively pretend they don’t exist, or to tease something you can never deliver on? It’s a dilemma we’ve seen with many adaptations in the one-coir anime era, but rarely do I recall it being quite so starkly displayed.
