Kujou and Yanagi fight to get Kujou to recognize her emotions while Souma seethes in the background. From club trips to the dreaded Manga Cold, it’s time to face facts. Or ignore them completely. It’s a tough call.
Now that we’ve settled into a routine, it’s pretty clear that this is a classic manga love triangle, except the No Hope Rival is also a conniving jerk who keeps making things worse for everybody, including himself. I don’t love Souma, but watching him screw up as much as Kujou and Yanagi is pretty amusing.
Kujou is really, truly the best part of this series - she’s just so methodical and her pace so glacial that she makes the migratory patterns of Arctic terns look like a stroll down the block for a bag of milk. There’s a reason I say it every time, but it take skill to write somebody this deadpan and not make them boring.
Her demeanour is so not the norm that she makes for a real breath of fresh air. Every time she manages a smile it’s like Moses parted the Red Sea again. She is most certainly in love, but without knowing what that means to her she is constantly friend-zoning Yanagi even as they are getting closer and closer.
And Yanagi just doesn’t have any chill left, I think he ran out back in the first volume, so he sees everything Souma is doing to Kujou with an unwarranted sense of jealousy and paranoia, plus he’s also grappling with having been given most everything in life, even if he doesn’t actually act like a rich snot.
It makes for some fun times - Souma’s also really actually starting to crush on Kujou, even as he mostly keeps pushing her towards Yanagi as he tries to mess things up.
This isn’t a bad little series - it’s become nice and comfy, plus the chemistry and interactions between the three main characters tends to be a lot of fun. It just had a vibe that it has settled into and it’s not especially interested in going beyond it.
Which, hey, not a bad thing. A comfy shojo is always a good find and all, but as it has settled itself in, it has very quickly sanded off the edges that made that first volume spectacular and the second volume pretty darn great.
That happens a lot with long series, but it comes on so fast here that it is a little shocking at its speed. I’m still going to read and enjoy this to bits, but it will be on its new terms, which aren’t as strong as its old ones.
3 stars - super solid; not much by way of its old brilliance, but it still has enough lustre to recommend it, especially if you enjoy spending time with these characters like I do.