I started out the day knowing I’d be doing two season finale posts for shows under the A-1 umbrella. If you’d told me neither would come with a sequel announcement, I’d have been very surprised. But the feeling with each is very different. No need to rehash the bleak depression of the Nigewaka situation again here. But with Make Heroine ga Oosugiru!, it truly is a matter only of when, not if. So not getting confirmation of a second season now is no big deal. Night and day situations emotionally.

Given all that – plus the fact that I don’t have quite the same emotional buy-in here – this was a low-stress finale for me. And to be honest, it was a pretty weak effort compared to most of the series. Not bad or anything, but pretty disconnected and lacking in narrative momentum. Original episodes of adapted anime are always a tricky matter. Even when, as here, they’re penned by the original author. Amamori Takibi created this ep specifically for the anime, and you can really tell. It plays more like an OVA than something that’s part of the main narrative.

The pretext here is that Yanami-san is getting hounded by middle school friends and eligible bachelors because the word is out that she and Nukumizu-kun aren’t actually dating. So the two of them cook up the idea of a fake date which they can document on social media to bolster the illusion that she’s actually got a beau. This eventually mushrooms into it being a “grown-up” date, around which Yanami concocts an elaborate fiction about her boyfriend being a successful businessman. But the grown-up date winds up being at a very teen place (amusement park-slash-natural history museum-slash-botanical garden) when Voyeur-sensei gives them some passes in the hopes of spying on some underage public foreplay.

I don’t think we need to dig too deeply into all that. It’s a pretty silly premise and I’m really not sure why Nuk-kun is playing along with all of it, but whatever. It’s just an excuse for a lot of Anna being Anna and comic cameos for everyone in the main cast. There are amusing bits, like Lemon-san thinking a triceratops skeleton was a kaijuu. And the bit with Sousuke and Karen making out with the same ice cream was pretty out there. But nothing here stands out too much in either direction. It’s fine.

What this ep does seem to confirm beyond any reasonable doubt is that Amamori is firmly in the Kazu-Anna camp as far as the shipping wars go. Which was already, you know, pretty obvious but this seems to cement it. As you may be aware I’m Team Lemon but not in the romance sense, just generally, so this is fine. Although it must be said that although I like both Nuk-kun and Yanami a lot, I don’t see a ton of romantic spark between them. Right now it seems like they’ll eventually start dating because the idea that it’s the next logical step will become irresistible to them. And being teenagers they might get physical just for the sake of stress release. But there’s work to be done to convince me there’s a real romance lurking here.

Amamori-sensei said in a recent interview that the two romcoms that most influenced him were Bokuyaba and Kono Bijutsubu ni wa Monday ga Aru. And while he might have included the latter just as a nod to his co-creator Imigi Muru, I think that tracks. If that’s how your taste runs it’s no shock you’re going to create something good, as Makeine indeed is. Those are two of the funniest and most charming romcoms around (both middle school-based, and that’s no coincidence), though Bokuyaba is orders of magnitude deeper as a relationship study. And I get echoes of both in the vibe with Makeine (above and beyond the main heroine being a food-loving girl named Anna Y., which now must be taken as a direct homage).

I’ve already said what I think has to happen in S2 (or at least eventually) for this series to prove itself to be really special and not just “great for a light novel”. Kazuhiko needs a heroine arc of his own. He needs to become a character who lives for himself and not just as a utensil and cheerleader for the three girls. He needs desires and dreams and romantic inclinations. In short, to become a fully realized person in his own right. I’ll be surprised if it happens to be honest, because as good as this series is I think the limitations of the medium it springs from will be too restrictive for it to truly transcend them.

It wouldn’t totally shock me to be wrong, though, because LN or no it’s clear that Makeine is pretty damn smart. Especially as a study of introverts and introversion but also as an examination of the emotional frailty of adolescents it’s written with a lot of insight and – yes – restraint (not so much that on the comedy side). This is certainly my favorite LN romcom in a long time (to be honest I can’t even think of the last one I really liked) and one of the real pleasant surprises of 2024. It’s also, it must be said, a truly gorgeous anime with a great sense of style and a ton of artistic ambition. I have no idea if the second season will be the next time in charge for rookie director Kitamura Shoutarou, a Hatakeyama Mamoru disciple, but he’s someone I’ll definitely be keeping a close eye on.