AKA: それでも歩は寄せてくる ; Sore de Ayumu wa Yosete Kuru

Genre: Romantic Comedy

Length: Television series, 12 episodes, 25 minutes each

Distributor: Currently licensed by Sentai Filmworks, available streaming on HiDive.

Content Rating: TV-14 (Mature themes)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: Teasing Master Takagi-San (of course, and ANY of it); Tonari no Seki-kun

Notes: Based on manga by Souichirou Yamamoto, published by Kodansha

Rating:

When Will Ayumu Make His Move?

Synopsis

Urushi Yaotome and Ayumu Tanaka are the only two active members of the Shogi Club. (There's a third "ghost member", but even with him there are only 3, and an official school club here requires 4, so Urushi and Ayumu just play their games in a storeroom.) On the one hand, Urushi (who's a shogi whiz) would like to add enough members to have an official club, but on the other hand both of them are a little reluctant to abandon the cozy intimacy of only having each other as an opponent. Ayumu, in fact, would like to confess his true feelings of love to Urushi, but he vows he'll only do so if he defeats her in a completely fair game- a tall order, since mastery of shogi is a skill that runs in her family.

Review

This one is based on a manga by Souichirou Yamamoto, creator of Teasing Master Takagi-San, and it honestly represents a conscious surrender to what that author knows is a cliched formula- because the author parodied it in Takagi-San. Let me explain:

Tim, in the synchros, has referred to Takagi-San as the "gender-reversed chronicles", and this is exactly correct. What I guess you could call the "classical" formula is for a suave (and overbearing) male to win (often through harassment) the heart of a tsundere girl (who is obviously embarrassed by his attentions.) Yamamoto lampooned this in a little "anime-within-the-anime" in Takagi-San called "100% Unrequited Love", which followed the formula pretty exactly, while the actual storyline of Takagi-San stood this on its head; Takagi herself took the pro-active, self-assured role (though usually in a gentle way, and she was, quietly, more vulnerable than her male target ever imagined); while her male target, Nishikata, assumed the easily-flustered tsundere role. The domineering male character in "100% Unrequited" was named Ikeo, and the easily-exasperated (and chronically clumsy) female character was named Kyunko. The First Season of Takagi-San aired on Crunchyroll, and viewer comments there included identifying "100% Unrequited" as a "1990's style" romcom, with a few even proclaiming they'd watch it, if it were a real show. (With the campy exaggeration there, maybe I would too, at least for a while. By the way, while Ayumu is airing on HiDive, this is as good a place as any for me to grouse about the disappearance of Viewer Comments on Crunchy. (You can still upvote/downvote episodes there.) I guess it succumbed to the weight of massive trolling, but I'll miss the insights- and, even more, the info- that the Collective Anime Community could provide.)

Since I'm sure you're wondering where I'm going with this, here's the point: When Will Ayumu Make His Move? is "100% Unrequited Love" played straight. And I didn't find it that humorous, either.

Mind, Ayumu isn't precisely suave; it's more like he's completely deadpan. He heaps lavish praise on Urushi, though in an utterly expressionless voice, which discomfits her, though she struggles to conceal her embarrassment, not always successfully, just like the tsunderes always did in the originals that inspired "100% Unrequited". She's also just as physically clumsy as Kyunko et al. The show attempts to use this awkwardness for humor in the inevitable Sports Festival arc: while Ayumu is an excellent athlete (he used to be in the Kendo Club), Urushi trips over- well, not necessarily completely her own shoelaces, it's a three-legged race. While Takagi had her trademark high forehead and enormous brown eyes, Urushi is a small girl with a very generic look.

In Ayumu, though, the secondary characters maybe carry more of the story load than in Takagi-San, especially later on. Takeru Kakuryu was also in Ayumu's Kendo club; he's the third "ghost member" of the club, and he tries to actively participate again- to the extent that his possessive girlfriend, Sakurako Mikage, will let him. She's a tiny girl with a tiny voice (and some of the most unusual hair braiding I've ever seen), who we initially see controlling him through hypnosis, though that gimmick seems to be forgotten later.

The other late addition is Rin Kagawa, another former member of Ayumu's Kendo Club. When she did kendo, she put a premium on dominance, and is thus dismissive of Ayumu for his constant shogi losses to Urushi, even though she might have had a secret kendo resolve toward him analogous to his secret shogi resolve toward Urushi. Rin's own shogi skill level is somewhere between Ayumu's and Urushi's, and with the addition of her (and more participation by Takeru) the club finally has enough members to be official- and watching the final ensemble playing together I, finally, found enjoyable, after the slow slog of the rest of the show. (Shogi tactics are explicitly mentioned maybe not more than twice; this is NOT March Comes in Like a Lion.)

Besides capitulating to cliche, and thus being intrinsically less interesting than Yamamoto's other (and much better) work, there's very little momentum in the relationship here (though to be fair, even the Takagi/Nishikata relationship didn't really start to take off until the latter part of Season Two.) But I stuck with Takagi-San for 3 seasons (and a movie) because I grew to care for the protagonists. Alas, neither Ayumu nor Urushi moved me that much as characters- and, since as far as I know, there's no Season Two of this either in actual existence or planned, I might not be alone in this opinion. It's not necessarily a BAD show, on its own terms; but it just looks mediocre by comparison to Takagi-San, and it's more disappointing because we KNOW the author is aware of those cliches. — Allen Moody

Recommended Audience: HiDive says TV-14. Maybe there were some "mature situations" somewhere I missed?