Amagami SS

AMAGAMI SS is remarkable because it is not. There are many anime like it that came before, and there will be many anime like it that come after. It’s a complete and utter failure of a show, flunking any chance to establish even a base amount of drama, characters, or plot to tug at throughout its twenty-five episode run. By never committing to anything, Amagami gets away with murder - its own murder, intently resolved to shoot itself in the foot at every opportunity.

Let me cue you into the way of the Amagami.

Every four episodes, Junichi, our downtrodden protagonist with awful bangs and all the personality of a boiling water pot, reminisces on when a girl stood him up two years ago on Christmas Eve. He longs for a date this coming Christmas Eve, but is too heartbroken to admit it to himself. The kid reminds me of high school me posting captioned Joker images to my Snapchat story.

And so it begins! It’s a easy recipe to follow: boy meets girl, they talk for four episodes, then have a confessional scene (with a few inconsequential in-betweens)! Add a dash of other characters to taste, and enough bland dialogue to fill an elephant’s belly. Want more instructions? Follow the steps below!

Episode one, boy meets girl. Through some precarious circumstance, Junichi runs into this special person of his, they begin having more intimate altercations, whether it’s bartering for bread loaves during lunch (Oh, Japan!) or flirting in the nurse’s office. They begin to meet more and more, and develop what seems like feelings for each other. Episode two, the boy and girl converse deeper. More signs of liking each other. Episode three, some third-party development threatens to tear the two apart. This could be a part-time restaurant job, the school Christmas festival, or plain ol’ miscommunication. End on a cliffhanger. Episode four, things are brought to a retching climax as our duo sobs over each other and clutches the other’s jacket while all but screaming “I love you”s.

Rinse and repeat with each female lead until you have a well-soiled two-cour show on your hands.

The draw of any romance anime with multiple interests (also known as ‘harem’ anime, in this case) is the main group of girls. In anime fan culture, it’s common to have a barrage of favorite characters to brawl over online in the never-ending pursuit of the self-explanatory title of ‘Best Girl’. This requires variance, and there’s a few tried-and-true narrative tropes that are commonly found in these types of shows. For example, the nerd, the athlete, the class president, the childhood friend, the best friend, and the popular girl, just to name a few. Now, which of these popular tropes does Amagami use? Don’t worry, I’ll make the timer quick. Three, two…ALL OF THEM?!

Amagami refuses to be an affront to its predecessors and, instead of shaking the metaphorical can, leaves it open until it goes flat. The cast of Amagami SS is about as interesting as stale bread. When it’s sitting in your cabinet, it might look appealing, but soon you’ll find out why it’s only appealing from afar. There’s no nuance to these characters, they are but the beset archetypes and clichés they were meant to fit into. But, as Robert McKee and Syd Field state many times in their various books on narrative, clichés are not bad because they’re clichés! There’s a reason they were set in place before - it’s because, at one point, they worked. At one point, each of these archetypes, say, for the childhood friend character, ran deeper, addressing issues like unresolved feelings, growth apart over the years, changing emotions, and the closeness the pair feel together alongside their coming romance, all aspects stirring together to create a familiar yet satisfactory story soup! How does Amagami SS handle this? By having our female lead of the childhood friend trope, Rihoko, address her feelings for the main character internally… and never acting on them. WHAT?! That’s right - For four, twenty-five minute length episodes, we’re treating to nothing more than a character cocktease: tricklings of what may be, never going anywhere. We don’t come close to an outright rejection, or an outright acceptance, we just see our two leads for this arc being around each other and sometimes, sometimes, blushing! That’s it. That’s our romance. Imagine When Harry Met Sally ended with Harry walking away from the New Years’ Party, soliloquizing with a “Oh, I hope Sally comes around …And that, one day, I’m able to tell her my true feelings.” Fade to black.

I would throw my beloved extra-buttered large popcorn tub at the screen to the horror of the underpaid workers below.

That’s exactly what we get in Amagami.

Amagami is only at the top of one thing - Christmas anime lists across the web. It shouldn’t be. It’s not there because it’s notable, but because it’s one of the few with Christmas as a main point, even if only tangentially. Be assured - If there were more, Amagami would surely be buried beneath that pile as well.

Amagami is a baffling show.

In any given episode, you could be subject to the a public body-kissing scene, an unflinchingly odd choice Amagami consistently chooses to include. It’s the author’s barely-disguised fetish given flesh.

It has shot variety, but no character acting. It has great backgrounds, with nothing to use them for. It has music, but no tunes you can hum. There are side stories, but they go nowhere. There are boys and girls talking, but they have no chemistry. There are characters, but they aren’t interesting! That’s the main point of a drama!

The most entertaining character is the lead’s best friend, because, in true high school male fashion, all he does is talk loudly about porn magazines, and then dramatically lament about his poor luck with women for, which he claims, he has no reason why.

Amagami is no one’s favorite show.

It’s a slapdash of all the tropes you’ve known before, a haphazard product, done in better ways in every way. Watching Amagami is like choosing to eat Arby’s. You can. It’s your life, dude. But, I guess sometimes, you just gotta have Arby’s.

I think I’m gonna hurl.