Even though I like my high school rom-coms, I admit I’m a little wary of it. While you can’t always tell a series of information based on its title, light novels are often what they say about their overly long cans that are all they say, and comic adaptations of these novels sometimes make their arrangements more mixed. So, I’m a little worried that something with the “second prettiest” in the title will stand out with judgment or meanness. Volume 1 is not perfect, but it sets the stage for a more thoughtful story than I expected.
The story revolves around a high school student named Maki who has a hard time socializing, which seems to ruin his chances when he is a movie nerd Bovies. This changed when he happened to meet classmate Umi in a movie shop, and she happened to like his movie. She also revealed that she has been looking for excuses to be friends with him since she found out she had a similar taste, but because Maki was worried about how this new friendship would affect their two social role models, he agreed to keep it secret with the rest of her while she kept it secret.
While I hope this premise is a romantic comedy setting, most of the first volume is dedicated to exploring the contrast between the two of them navigating through the social circle. Umi is the type of person who is good at mobility and knows how to avoid conflict with others, but this also leads to her always wearing a mask when hanging in large groups and finding herself constantly following people’s perspectives about her, purely based on her social status. Even the status of the so-called second most beautiful girl in her class is due to the frequency of boys comparing her to her more popular friend Yuu, and she finds herself constantly approaching them, simply because she is seen as more “achable” of the two. With all the social pressures in her life, it’s not hard to see why she’s looking for a friend who can keep herself guarded, and you can understand why she’s willing to endure Maki’s desire to keep their friendship hidden if she can maintain it.
Inversely, McGee is a person who works hard to operate in a group and has trouble due to the frequency of parents walking around. This made him constantly worry about what others think of him and therefore tried to avoid standing out as much as possible. Although Maki isn’t too interesting in the two, he still feels a realistic description of someone’s socially troubled person, and the story’s impact on these anxieties is enough to make him feel like a real teenager rather than a blank slate. We see a lot of things through our interactions with Yuu, Yuu is more naturally friendly than any of us, so whenever the two meet each other, Maki makes Maki feel uncomfortable or she tries to invite him to hang out with a group of friends. The series easily constructs these interactions as merely the issue where Maki needs to be more social, but for the fact that some people are not completely bad in large groups and do not completely ignore Maki’s perception of it while still making it clear that he has a lot of people growing into one. These encounters ultimately led Yuu to decide that she wanted to get to know Maki better so that they could become friends. I’m interested in seeing how the friendship between them develops when Yuu is his polar opposite.
So far, this has led me to a big criticism of the story, and ironically, the actual friendship between Maki and Umi. Although this first volume does a decent enough of explaining why these two would be drawn to each other, it goes from having them agree to the friendship to immediately seeing them casually hang out, and given how socially averse Maki is, I think it would have benefited from seeing him get used to Umi’s presence in his life (although the end of the volume does include an excerpt from the light novels that details the first time Maki invites Umi to his house, so this might be a flaw of the manga adaptation rather than the original material). Given that their friendship is built on the initial foundation of a common good, I also hope to see them for a moment actually combined on a B-movie, rather than just taking it as a set-up, although it’s more of a picky look than anything else. My biggest problem is that while Maki is portrayed as unsafe to make you understand why he is so desperate to cover up his friendship with Umi with his classmates, it doesn’t make him do it, which makes him so upset and makes him feel that he doesn’t value their friendship as much as she does. Thankfully, this is a problem he is very aware of, so I tend to believe it will be resolved in future volumes. But, with everything we have now, it’s hard to feel engaged in seeing them get closer.
Apart from these complaints, I otherwise found the series very rude. The artwork is solid, if not particularly striking Sarah Burch It was done well to make these characters sound like real teenagers without feeling it was hard to sound modern. If you want to make a relatively cold high school drama, so far the proposed content here can be read simply. That is, if this continues to fit into the observations of social expectations expressed in Volume 1, then there is a stronger story. While I think building a relationship with lead requires more, it planted enough seeds that I think it can get there.
