

Overall, better than I was anticipating. The show’s about Ayla, but she’s definitely not the most interesting character here. Far and away, Yuki is consistently more compelling, and Masachika too, to an extent. It was very strong out the gate if you can excuse some of the heavy fanservice, but it definitely began to teeter off in the last third. Those speeches weren’t as convincing as they needed to be for the moments to feel justified.
They’ve got room to make the follow-ups interesting, but I don’t have a tonne of faith based on some of the ways it’s been written so far, and I can’t say this season was particularly satisfying by itself, either. Spoiler warning from here on out!
Characters weren’t especially multi-dimensional and we didn’t see very much of progression from them. They were setting up interesting character dynamics, and that really carried them early on, but then we don’t really see anyone changing as they face the challenges ahead. The closest we get to that is Masachika eventually giving in to joining the student council. But we don’t really see what changed about him to do that. Early on this was actually quite a strong point about his character, his past trauma clearly interfering with his ability to believe that Ayla’s obvious flirting is sincere…



But by FAR the best part of this show was Yuki when she was being herself. The humour was degenerate, a bit crass, but she is so charismatic when she’s on screen. There’s plenty of genuinely funny lines here, the show was always way more interesting whenever she was present as her true self.






The structure/pacing was pretty standard for a season intended to be continued. I think my biggest issue is that I don’t feel as though they’ve very clearly outlined character motivations; I don’t know why Masachika is doing anything for anybody right now. It’s not like he’s said he actually likes Alya, I’m pretty sure they were trying to imply he still doesn’t actively have feelings for her.
Music-wise, nothing bad. I remember kinda bumping to the BGM when I took this one screenshot, felt like I was trying to sneak around, but the clap of my ass cheeks kept alerting the guards.

It's because of this that I can’t rate it very highly compared to something like Pseudo Harem, which I reviewed recently. Though this show might be a little better in terms of the moment-to-moment writing, overall, it fails to deliver in a truly satisfying way, and it’s going to bank too heavily on the execution of the follow-up season, which we don’t have yet. That, and this one definitely started to get less engaging in the last third. Pseudo Harem did a better job with character growth, too.
I still think it was fairly decent, but it’s somewhat difficult to recommend considering it needs a season 2 to be worth the investment, and I’m not super confident that the writers can deliver in said season 2 based on their current habits. We’ll see!

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