Yamada-kun to Lv999 no Koi o Suru is a series that I suspect would be close to a slam-dunk most seasons.  But it’s in the busiest season in a few years, on the busiest day of the season.  As such, the bar is going to be pretty high by necessity.  It could be that this is one of the shows that fall under the umbrella of those concessions I keep telling myself I’m going to have to make – more digests, shorter posts, few or no screencaps, not covering very bloggable shows altogether.  Or it could prove itself indispensable enough that I can’t do any of those things.  We’ll see.

What I can say for sure is I like it pretty well so far, even if it’s not quite riveting yet.  Asaka Morio’s visual touches add a lot to the experience, the BGM is nice, and the main couple are good together.  We see shoujo romance pretty rarely these days in anime, and there is a bit of disconnect with all these tropes I’ve kind of lost my feel for.  But at the same time we get shounen and seinen romances every season (though not as many as this one), so it’s nice have one that comes at the problem from a different angle.

Akane is a hell of a mess, thats for sure.  She’s relieved that nothing happened at Yamada-kun’s place (she’d be even more so if she knew then how old he was) but still – getting drunk, puking all over yourself and waking up in a guy’s apartment is a real bad look.  It’s dangerous for starters, and it’s a heck of an imposition on him.  I’ve kind of been in a similar situation (to Yamada’s) so I relate pretty hard – all things considered I think he takes the whole thing pretty well.

Akane’s spectacularly unsympathetic friend Momo isn’t much help.  I guess we could say this is tough love but damn, every time we’ve seen her Momo has been incredibly tactless and harsh.  And she appears to be Akane’s only friend, too, which just makes her seem like that much more of a basket case.  Akane’s latest drama is that she’s lost the necklace Takuma gave her, most likely at Yamada’s place (though he says he hasn’t seen it).  Akane’s attachment to the necklace is unhealthy, obviously – the dude dumped her, and is clearly a loser.  But it’s easy to say that from the outside looking in, I suppose.

When Yamada does find the necklace – underneath his foot, broken – he carries it around with him in the hope that he’ll run into Akane.  Which he eventually does at the train station, though she sees him first, as he’s obliviously shooting down a confession from a kouhai.  Akane doesn’t seem too shocked that Yamada’s a high schooler, and I suppose given that their ages are probably 18 and 20-21 it’s not that huge a deal.  She professes not to care that the necklace is broken, but even Yamada is perceptive enough to see through that.  He stops her and gives her his umbrella, urging her not to return it.

If it weren’t already obvious Yamada-kun is a pretty decent kid.  He’s unpolished in his social graces, but his instincts run towards doing the right thing.  That’s not much to build on, though.  He does make an impact on her with his “be more selective” online comment, which comes into play when Akane drafts Momo to help her clean the apartment after Akane’s mom unloads all her stuff on her so she can turn her room into a gym.  I have a hard time with sentimental attachments to things too, so I sympathize – but even I can see Momo is somewhat right here (though totally being a jerk about it).

At this point Akane’s appeal to Yamada has basically been getting drunk and annoying him twice, and I believe he’s not lying about being a little pissed off at the rerun (with Momo in tow).  He presents as asexual and she’s just basically pathetic, so their relationship has nowhere to go but up from here.  But that invite to jump back into “Forest of Savior”, even if not a tsundere statement of interest (and I don’t think it was) is a ticket to get Akane back into Yamada’s orbit (and another sign of his essentially sympathetic nature, which anyone dating Akane is clearly going to need to have).