I’m in travel mode, which means somewhat shorter posts than normal – please bear with me.  First of the trip is Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta, and – believe it or not – I thought this was another good episode.  I find myself in an odd position with this show, which is defending it as a manga reader against broad general criticism.  Usually it’s the other way around if anything – I’m a tough audience with manga I love.  But I really do think this adaptation is okay.  Yeah, Kaede’s characterization isn’t quite a bullseye and GoHands occasionally Gohand’s.  But on the whole, I mean – I like it.  And interestingly, the reception seems to be much better with Japanese audience’s than English-speakers.

It’s Valentine’s.  And it’s pretty much a given that any romcom manga has to have a Valentine’s chapter (at least one) – even hardcore mold-breakers like BokuYaba.  Having worked in middle schools here I’ve yet to see one where the exchange of Valentine’s/White Day gifts wasn’t banned, and while we do occasionally see that reflected in animanga (Takagi-san, for example) it’s generally overlooked as a matter of convenience.  Kaede is on a shopping errand for his Mom (ketchup), and openly musing about wanting to get chocolate from Mie-san.  She shows up (sans her glasses) and overhears, leaving him scrambling to cover his tracks.  She can sense the red tide even without her specs, but Kaede steers her to the supermarket (her errand is mayonnaise), but that’s no refuge from the crimson wave.

Kaede isn’t spot-on (this ep was the closest he’s been to his manga self), but Ai is absolutely on-point.  The expressions, the attitude, the voice – the anime nailed it.  She’s naive and scatterbrained, but she’s not stupid – and that’s important.  She eventually puts the pieces together and figures out what Kaede was wishing for, but she frames it as a “friend choco” kind of thing.  This is kind of a Pyrrhic victory for Kaede-kun (he has a lot of those) – his cover’s not blown and she thinks of him as a friend, but just a friend.  There is an element of Taiyou from Clueless Transfer Student with Ai, where you wonder if she gets more than she lets on, but in this situation I tend to take her at face value.

Valentine’s Day is a bit of a disaster, as Ai accidentally gives away the honmei choco she was planning (hmmm) to give Kaede.  She’s broken up about this but can’t think of a suitable replacement, so she tells him he can make any one request of her.  His request is that she listen to what he has to say, and he’s actually trying to confess – but that would be like the protagonist of an Adachi series winning the Koushien as a first-year.  Again, if Ai has figured out what he was trying to get out she has a good poker face (and I don’t think she has a good poker face).

When White Day rolls around Kaede is planning to reciprocate the eventual friend choco he got with white baumkuchen, but Ai is freaked out about her post-Valentine’s (she got a lot of chocolate from her girl friends) weight gain.  So she asks Kaede to be her catcher in the rye, stopping her from eating any of the delectable delicacies she’s given (including what look like honmei cookies from Azuma-kun).  Ai trying to indulge herself and justifying it with increasingly preposterous denials based on her lack of glasses in one of the cutest moments in the series so far.  Eventually Kaede caves and gives her his gift, reasoning that’s if she’s going to cheat anyway she may as well do it with his gift.  Which, notably, she does.

What can I say – for me, this totally works.  I think some viewers struggle with the anime because they don’t like the premise, and the adaptation itself has nothing to do with it – and fair play to them.  But as time progresses the glasses hook becomes less and less of a thing in and of itself, and more a pretext for more meaningful development – and this ep is where we can see the process really starting to kick in.  I really love this pair, more so in manga form sure, but plenty here too.  The charms The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses are considerable, and they’re absolutely more apparent in the anime than I feared they would be.