With Shiki on hiatus, Kuroshitsuji finished and the fall season not quite upon us, it’s been a slow week on the anime front. So I thought I’d check back in with Amigami SS and see if things have picked up at all now that the underwhelming Sae arc has ended.

And based on one episode, I would say they have – at least somewhat. The annoying narration is gone, for one. And Ai-chan is certainly a much more interesting character than Sae. She’s forceful, snarky and a bit dangerous – more like Haruka (my fave so far) than either of the two girls that followed her. Of course, unlike Haruka she’s a first-year – a classmate of Miya-chan in fact – and this lends an interesting and different tone to the romantic and sexually charged moments.

As for Junichi, he seems something of a cross between his persona from the first three arcs. In this episode he seemed like a fairly normal teen male – awkward, horny, kind of a goofball but mostly harmless. That lent a fairly authentic tenor to the moments between he and Ai-chan. Where in the first arc he was a slyly clever puppy-dog, in the second a put-upon best friend, and in the third something of a wolf to the lambishly-timid Sae, he’s straight down the middle here. He and Ai-chan seem to be on a pretty equal footing here – she’s more daring, but also as the younger a bit deferential towards him. He’s clearly inexperienced but smart enough to pick up on the signals she sends him. All in all, it made for a pretty effective vibe in the first episode.

So that’s me, back blogging this one at least for now. If the Ai arc lives up to the potential it showed in the first ep, I may just stick through till the end.