Our second fall First Impressions is a romcom from the lower portion of the season preview like the first, Yano-kun. And while this one is a shoujo and that one a seinen, they hit pretty similarly for me. That is, sort of “fine”. Pleasant, pretty toothless, seemingly very earnest and straightforward. And all of that without really closing the circuit for me. Benign and competent without doing anything really interesting or compelling. At least so far.

Taiyou yori mo Mabushii Hoshi is, notably, a product of the pen of Kawahara Kazune. She also did Ore Monogatari!!!, which had an adaptation that I quite liked. Neither is what I would call a hard-core shojo romance. You know what I mean, something in the vein of Honey Lemon Soda. As such it’s not drowning in tropes and sparkles (though there are some). As someone who isn’t that big a fan of shoujo romance generally, that’s a plus for me. Also a plus is the Sapporo setting, both because I like Hokkaido a lot and because one does get tired of series set in Tokyo.

This has the air of a pretty straightforward osananajimi romance going by the premiere. Iwata Sae and Kamishiro Kouki are third-year middle schoolers who’ve been friends since first-grade elementary. Both look like college students, frankly – she’s very tall for a 14  year-old girl (167 cm) and he for a boy that age. But of course as we know it’s more socially acceptable for a boy to be super tall than a girl, and Sae has a bit of a complex about this. She also has a complex about Kouki, who she’s loved pretty much from the start. He was an undersized crybaby who couldn’t drink his milk then, but he’s grown into a full-blown ikemen now that Sae considers (wrongly) to be out of her league.

I like some elements of this. Sae’s observation about how everyone has “discovered” Kouki’s cool mystique is like when your niche manga or band goes viral is very astute. But an essential problem for me is that it’s hard to see where the drama or conflict is going to come from. Because, I mean, it couldn’t be more obvious that Kouki is just as nuts about Sae as she is about him. As such it’s going to be hard to convince me that any challenges to their relationship are real. Maybe this is just going to be a romance about the two of them going out, but that’s not the impression left by the premiere.

I have to reach the same verdict I did with Yano-kun no Futsuu no Hibi here – it’s too soon to say. I liked both about the same, though my gut it telling me Yano-kun’s premise might have more legs than Taiyou yori mo Mabushii Hoshi’s. A high school romance has a relatively high bar to clear in order to be interesting – it’s hard to imagine a more well-worn animanga subgenre – and I’m just not sure either series has what it takes to clear it. But they’re pleasant stories about nice kids, so I’m willing to give each at least one more shot at winning me over.