English Dub Review: My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999 “You Want To Feel at Ease?”
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
Yamada reflects on why he felt flustered when being close to Akane and returns home, but briefly interacts with Takuma, her ex. With her laptop repaired, she’s able to game again, and meets Takezo’s avatar, who is one inch tall for most of the game except battle.
OUR TAKE
Well, it seems like the gears are finally starting to turn over on the Yamada side of things, as it looks like he’s starting to get…SOME sort of reaction from Akane now. For the entire first half of this series, it looked like we were basically just watching the growing feelings of one girl and the asexual, possibly autistic guy who was the target, which would have maybe been a neat twist but still rather unfortunate to see dragged out to a pretty depressing endpoint. There’s been so much prodding from people around Yamada that he needs to start dating and treats women awkwardly that we were just waiting for him come out and say he simply doesn’t like women because he doesn’t like ANYONE that way. But yeah, no, it seems like he is in fact capable of feeling affection for someone of a different gender, it’s just that he might have some possible trauma he needs to work through before the dam can really start to break. We see a brief flashback to his elementary school days where it looks like a childhood friend was bullied but he said the wrong thing and maybe that colored his perception of love? And yet he still seems to get stares from all the girls in proximity, which is all out of his control. Huh.
That seems to be all the interesting things happening this episode, as the stuff with Akane is either at rest or suddenly grinded to a halt. I mean, I guess it’s clear by now that she likes Yamada and the guild is trying to get them to hook up, even Runa now after her awful behavior a couple episodes ago that I frankly still haven’t forgiven her for. Even Akane’s ex, Takuma, is basically just making a brief appearance for Yamada’s sake, probably just to make him think about Akane more. Then again, he was never meant to be that complex a character to begin with, just the awkward past relationship Akane is meant to move on from to get with her new…high schooler relationship? That was a pretty odd reveal that Yamada is still actually in highschool. Looking forward to seeing that eventually get found out. I’m sure the age difference isn’t that bad, at least not nearly as bad as other anime that seem to almost revel in how gross they’re being, but it’ll be good to just get that confirmation out of the way.
