Waiting for Spring volume 6
Well, work didn't turn out to go super fast like we hoped, but it did go a little fast! We made it all the way to the dialect part in our edit, so we get to start the day off with the hard part tomorrow! Woohoo!
But now it's time for a review! Waiting for Spring 6! Spoilers ahead!
Our current crunch (January 2018) wasn't really allowing for extra time to write reviews, but then our schedule got all wonky and we were highly unmotivated, but we thought if we could just stall until dinner time, maybe we could get back to work after dinner. And we have just enough time to write a review, so here we are!
Waiting for Spring...six! Of course, how could I forget? It's the one where Mitsuki finally gets to be on the cover! I think it's so cute how Anashin talks about the covers. She's adorable. I admit, I don't necessarily look forward to the Silhouette Pop Quizzes, but I do enjoy them.
Now...what happened again? Mitsuki was getting ready for the festival, and...of course! Reina. Reina brings up what promises to be one of the best things in the series so far, and she brings it up at the beginning of the volume, but we won't even get to see it until the next one! I mean, I'm not a fujoshi like Reina, but I do like to see pretty boys in cosplay. For context, the class decided to do a cafe, and the boys were fighting it, and Reina said, "Hey, let's do cosplay!" and Towa agreed because he wasn't listening (the way Anashin drew her "nudge nudge wink wink" sort of eye movements was pretty good; it's hard to show that gesture without moving pictures), so the whole class said okay yeah let's do that. I have to agree with the guys, though, "But everyone's gonna do cosplay!" I mean, seriously, how many high school manga have you seen where they don't do some kind of cosplay cafe? Okay, so some of them do haunted houses. We would have been with them, wanting to do a play. Plays used to be the school festival cliche, come to think of it: Fruits Basket, DN Angel... Okay, I actually don't remember that many with plays, but they did one in Kamigami no Asobi, and when they did it in the anime version, it was hilarious. They did a play in Gakuen Alice, too.
But I digress. The point is, I'm very curious as to what kind of cosplay Reina would have gone with, and I was a little sad to find out we won't get to find out until next time (we do have the next volume, so if we get really impatient, we can find out, but we still haven't read those two Noragami chapters after the end of volume 18, so I think we can probably wait). But I guess that's okay, because the real excitement is elsewhere! Aya has declared war on Towa, and soon the joint practice where the battle is to take place is upon us! Dun dun DUN!
So...yeah, there's basketball and stuff. I mean, come on, what is there to say? It was pretty much the same stuff as usual, except that Reina had a video camera so there weren't any jokes about her ridiculously oversized camera. And they practiced. All the girls were getting pretty bored with it because, you know, it was a practice and not a game, so they were like, "Ugh, why do I even care?" And then! they had one-on-one practice. And guess who ended up playing each other! That's right, Aya and Towa. But of course Mitsuki didn't see it, because Mitsuki always manages to be gone when her boys want her to be watching. But she did happen to walk by the gym door when Towa came flying out of it. We were like, "...It's...basketball...right?" How does that even happen? (Don't tell us. We later remembered that we think it was a basketball game our stepfather and brothers-in-law were watching when suddenly they all groaned in sympathy and started saying things like, "That shouldn't bend that way." And we're squeamish, so we tried to hear as few details as possible. This is one reason we're not real big sports fans.)
And Aya was all, "You're lucky she didn't see that." But Towa had just told Mitsuki that he always wanted her to see him, and let me tell you, lines like that are NOT easy to translate. It's like, "Okaaay...how do I make this not sound self-centered or creepy?" "You always need to be watching MEEEEEE!" ...Right, it's usually the other way around that gets creepy. "I'm always watching you." I think we handled it well enough, but it's not a "direct" translation, necessarily. The point is, Towa wants Mitsuki to be there with him when things happen in his life, and his life is pretty much all basketball all the time, so. He had a monologue about that later, and I don't remember exactly, but I think it boiled down to, "I wouldn't have minded if Mitsuki had seen that." And then he does the same thing to Aya, which was to ram him so hard he fell over (and went flying, in the case of when it happened to Towa).
And basically, it really just seems like Aya still can't get over his caveman mentality of, "If I can prove I'm the better player, Mitsuki is sure to love me!" If you pay attention, it doesn't really seem like Mitsuki cares about them winning except for the fact that she cares about them as people and knows that they want to win. And Aya is really stupid about it, too. When will he realize that if he's a jerk to the boy Mitsuki cares about, he'll only make her angry at him and more sympathetic to the other guy? I guess people have a hard time catching on to these things when they're so preoccupied. Oh well; it's a shoujo manga, so I'm sure it will all work out eventually.
In the end, Towa and Aya never got to settle the score, and the practice ended. Meanwhile, Rui's super irritated about Aya, and everyone is finally starting to catch on that he's in love with Mitsuki. He really threw us off in volume one when he put Towa's contact info in Mitsuki's phone; I thought it was because he could see that she was interested in him. Maybe he did, but she was so slow about it, he forgot about it. And he didn't even really know himself that he had a thing for her, so it makes sense. And while he's figuring that out, Maki Sudo, the other girl who has a crush on Towa, finds his wristband! Oh no!!! And of course he has a white one, so she can't miss that there's writing on the inside, and as you all remember, the superstition was to get your true love to write a message on your wristband to help you win. And since Towa has a message on his wristband, that means he has a true love, and since she knows she didn't write it, Maki knows it's not her, and now she is devastated, poor girl. On the bright side, she and Rui can comfort each other on the rebound. But the important thing is that she's how Rui finds out that Towa has a crush, because Towa never tells anybody anything. Except Kyosuke, because Kyosuke can get anyone to tell him anything, probably because he's observant enough to figure out just enough to make it so they can't hide it anymore.
Anyway. The reason I'm telling you all this is because it leads to Rui asking Towa about it, and Towa tells him that his crush is Mitsuki, and that leads to one of the cutest pictures of Rui! It's great, because you can kind of see in his eyes how his brain has short-circuited, like he really has no idea what he thinks of this new information. Well, of course, after avoiding the subject for a while, Towa eventually forces Rui to talk about it, and they work it out, and Rui says well okay, I guess you're better than that Kamiyama guy. One of the things I like about this series is that, while Mitsuki and Towa are incredibly slow about this whole thing, they have good reasons to be. Mitsuki's slow because she's so shy...and let me talk about that for a second. We read a review of Waiting for Spring where the reviewer is like, "Nuh-uh. She claims to be 'so shy,' but she has no trouble talking to customers at the cafe? Objection! That's a contradiction." But as a shy person myself, I can tell you that it's possible to push yourself to be not-so-shy in certain situations. There's a big difference between trying to approach someone in a social setting and in a professional setting. At the cafe, they need her to get her food, so she can say, "I'm here to help you." But if you're in a social setting, you don't know if people will like you or be annoyed by you or what. At the cafe, she's definitely contributing and necessary. In a social situation, she has no such guarantees, and in that case, there's a stronger possibility that people will actively not want her there. And of course, anyone who's still reading the series at volume six knows she's working on not being so shy anyway.
And Towa is slow because, before he and Mitsuki were really interested in each other, he already knew about Aya, and what a big part of her life he was. He's not sure how to deal with that, and he's not allowed to date anyway, so he might as well just focus on basketball. And then he was about to tell Mitsuki that he likes her anyway, but he was already thinking about how apparently Rui was in love with her, so he held back again! Aww, what a sweet friend. And it all makes sense! (To us, at least. I mean, certain reviews have made it clear that the same things do not always make sense to everyone.)
So now everything is resolve with Rui, and we have yet to see if Kyosuke's crush on Mitsuki is going to come into play. I mean, after Rui threw me off in volume one, people would call this series a reverse harem, and we'd be like, "...But it's not, really." But now it totally is. And Rui did the good luck charm with the teacup ride, and there's no way that Kyosuke didn't know about the heart-shaped ice cream charm. Kyosuke knows everything. Of course he knew, and he almost certainly shared one with Mitsuki on purpose.
Meanwhile, Mitsuki's been work work working away to get everything ready for the school festival, and we're like, "Okay, other class people. You can offer to do some of it, too." Seriously, Mitsuki doesn't have to be the only one taking stuff home to work on, does she? For crying out loud. And of course, since there were multiple people telling her not to push herself and to get enough sleep and gosh you're looking a little green, we all knew that eventually she was going to pass out. And she did. What I didn't see coming (but maybe I should have) was that Aya would happen to be right there to rescue her. But that's where the volume ends, so now it's just a bunch of suspense. WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT!? AND WHAT COSTUMES WILL THEY BE WEARING!? AAAAAAAAHHHH!
Then there's a cute bonus story about Towa, which I think speaks for itself, so I will say nothing about it but that you should read it because it's very cute.
Awww, this series just gets better and better. And that was a fun review! Nice work, past us!
Well, tune in next Reviewsday (that's Tuesday) for our review of Fire Force 10! Yay, Fire Force!!! We saw exactly one Fire Force cosplayer at Anime Expo, and we took a picture and showed it to our editor, and we were all like, "Why isn't this series more popular?" Check it out, you guys! I know it's not Soul Eater, but it's not supposed to be! Not liking a series because it's not like the author's last series is like saying, "Well, gosh, I can't like you. You're nothing like your older sibling (except for the ways where you're totally lazily copying him/her)."
Today I'm thankful for a fun review of Waiting for Spring, making pretty good progress on Fire Force, having time to watch an episode of anime, Fire Force cosplayers, and being fairly certain that our feline visitor didn't mark anything as his territory this morning.
But now it's time for a review! Waiting for Spring 6! Spoilers ahead!
Our current crunch (January 2018) wasn't really allowing for extra time to write reviews, but then our schedule got all wonky and we were highly unmotivated, but we thought if we could just stall until dinner time, maybe we could get back to work after dinner. And we have just enough time to write a review, so here we are!
Waiting for Spring...six! Of course, how could I forget? It's the one where Mitsuki finally gets to be on the cover! I think it's so cute how Anashin talks about the covers. She's adorable. I admit, I don't necessarily look forward to the Silhouette Pop Quizzes, but I do enjoy them.
Now...what happened again? Mitsuki was getting ready for the festival, and...of course! Reina. Reina brings up what promises to be one of the best things in the series so far, and she brings it up at the beginning of the volume, but we won't even get to see it until the next one! I mean, I'm not a fujoshi like Reina, but I do like to see pretty boys in cosplay. For context, the class decided to do a cafe, and the boys were fighting it, and Reina said, "Hey, let's do cosplay!" and Towa agreed because he wasn't listening (the way Anashin drew her "nudge nudge wink wink" sort of eye movements was pretty good; it's hard to show that gesture without moving pictures), so the whole class said okay yeah let's do that. I have to agree with the guys, though, "But everyone's gonna do cosplay!" I mean, seriously, how many high school manga have you seen where they don't do some kind of cosplay cafe? Okay, so some of them do haunted houses. We would have been with them, wanting to do a play. Plays used to be the school festival cliche, come to think of it: Fruits Basket, DN Angel... Okay, I actually don't remember that many with plays, but they did one in Kamigami no Asobi, and when they did it in the anime version, it was hilarious. They did a play in Gakuen Alice, too.
But I digress. The point is, I'm very curious as to what kind of cosplay Reina would have gone with, and I was a little sad to find out we won't get to find out until next time (we do have the next volume, so if we get really impatient, we can find out, but we still haven't read those two Noragami chapters after the end of volume 18, so I think we can probably wait). But I guess that's okay, because the real excitement is elsewhere! Aya has declared war on Towa, and soon the joint practice where the battle is to take place is upon us! Dun dun DUN!
So...yeah, there's basketball and stuff. I mean, come on, what is there to say? It was pretty much the same stuff as usual, except that Reina had a video camera so there weren't any jokes about her ridiculously oversized camera. And they practiced. All the girls were getting pretty bored with it because, you know, it was a practice and not a game, so they were like, "Ugh, why do I even care?" And then! they had one-on-one practice. And guess who ended up playing each other! That's right, Aya and Towa. But of course Mitsuki didn't see it, because Mitsuki always manages to be gone when her boys want her to be watching. But she did happen to walk by the gym door when Towa came flying out of it. We were like, "...It's...basketball...right?" How does that even happen? (Don't tell us. We later remembered that we think it was a basketball game our stepfather and brothers-in-law were watching when suddenly they all groaned in sympathy and started saying things like, "That shouldn't bend that way." And we're squeamish, so we tried to hear as few details as possible. This is one reason we're not real big sports fans.)
And Aya was all, "You're lucky she didn't see that." But Towa had just told Mitsuki that he always wanted her to see him, and let me tell you, lines like that are NOT easy to translate. It's like, "Okaaay...how do I make this not sound self-centered or creepy?" "You always need to be watching MEEEEEE!" ...Right, it's usually the other way around that gets creepy. "I'm always watching you." I think we handled it well enough, but it's not a "direct" translation, necessarily. The point is, Towa wants Mitsuki to be there with him when things happen in his life, and his life is pretty much all basketball all the time, so. He had a monologue about that later, and I don't remember exactly, but I think it boiled down to, "I wouldn't have minded if Mitsuki had seen that." And then he does the same thing to Aya, which was to ram him so hard he fell over (and went flying, in the case of when it happened to Towa).
And basically, it really just seems like Aya still can't get over his caveman mentality of, "If I can prove I'm the better player, Mitsuki is sure to love me!" If you pay attention, it doesn't really seem like Mitsuki cares about them winning except for the fact that she cares about them as people and knows that they want to win. And Aya is really stupid about it, too. When will he realize that if he's a jerk to the boy Mitsuki cares about, he'll only make her angry at him and more sympathetic to the other guy? I guess people have a hard time catching on to these things when they're so preoccupied. Oh well; it's a shoujo manga, so I'm sure it will all work out eventually.
In the end, Towa and Aya never got to settle the score, and the practice ended. Meanwhile, Rui's super irritated about Aya, and everyone is finally starting to catch on that he's in love with Mitsuki. He really threw us off in volume one when he put Towa's contact info in Mitsuki's phone; I thought it was because he could see that she was interested in him. Maybe he did, but she was so slow about it, he forgot about it. And he didn't even really know himself that he had a thing for her, so it makes sense. And while he's figuring that out, Maki Sudo, the other girl who has a crush on Towa, finds his wristband! Oh no!!! And of course he has a white one, so she can't miss that there's writing on the inside, and as you all remember, the superstition was to get your true love to write a message on your wristband to help you win. And since Towa has a message on his wristband, that means he has a true love, and since she knows she didn't write it, Maki knows it's not her, and now she is devastated, poor girl. On the bright side, she and Rui can comfort each other on the rebound. But the important thing is that she's how Rui finds out that Towa has a crush, because Towa never tells anybody anything. Except Kyosuke, because Kyosuke can get anyone to tell him anything, probably because he's observant enough to figure out just enough to make it so they can't hide it anymore.
Anyway. The reason I'm telling you all this is because it leads to Rui asking Towa about it, and Towa tells him that his crush is Mitsuki, and that leads to one of the cutest pictures of Rui! It's great, because you can kind of see in his eyes how his brain has short-circuited, like he really has no idea what he thinks of this new information. Well, of course, after avoiding the subject for a while, Towa eventually forces Rui to talk about it, and they work it out, and Rui says well okay, I guess you're better than that Kamiyama guy. One of the things I like about this series is that, while Mitsuki and Towa are incredibly slow about this whole thing, they have good reasons to be. Mitsuki's slow because she's so shy...and let me talk about that for a second. We read a review of Waiting for Spring where the reviewer is like, "Nuh-uh. She claims to be 'so shy,' but she has no trouble talking to customers at the cafe? Objection! That's a contradiction." But as a shy person myself, I can tell you that it's possible to push yourself to be not-so-shy in certain situations. There's a big difference between trying to approach someone in a social setting and in a professional setting. At the cafe, they need her to get her food, so she can say, "I'm here to help you." But if you're in a social setting, you don't know if people will like you or be annoyed by you or what. At the cafe, she's definitely contributing and necessary. In a social situation, she has no such guarantees, and in that case, there's a stronger possibility that people will actively not want her there. And of course, anyone who's still reading the series at volume six knows she's working on not being so shy anyway.
And Towa is slow because, before he and Mitsuki were really interested in each other, he already knew about Aya, and what a big part of her life he was. He's not sure how to deal with that, and he's not allowed to date anyway, so he might as well just focus on basketball. And then he was about to tell Mitsuki that he likes her anyway, but he was already thinking about how apparently Rui was in love with her, so he held back again! Aww, what a sweet friend. And it all makes sense! (To us, at least. I mean, certain reviews have made it clear that the same things do not always make sense to everyone.)
So now everything is resolve with Rui, and we have yet to see if Kyosuke's crush on Mitsuki is going to come into play. I mean, after Rui threw me off in volume one, people would call this series a reverse harem, and we'd be like, "...But it's not, really." But now it totally is. And Rui did the good luck charm with the teacup ride, and there's no way that Kyosuke didn't know about the heart-shaped ice cream charm. Kyosuke knows everything. Of course he knew, and he almost certainly shared one with Mitsuki on purpose.
Meanwhile, Mitsuki's been work work working away to get everything ready for the school festival, and we're like, "Okay, other class people. You can offer to do some of it, too." Seriously, Mitsuki doesn't have to be the only one taking stuff home to work on, does she? For crying out loud. And of course, since there were multiple people telling her not to push herself and to get enough sleep and gosh you're looking a little green, we all knew that eventually she was going to pass out. And she did. What I didn't see coming (but maybe I should have) was that Aya would happen to be right there to rescue her. But that's where the volume ends, so now it's just a bunch of suspense. WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT!? AND WHAT COSTUMES WILL THEY BE WEARING!? AAAAAAAAHHHH!
Then there's a cute bonus story about Towa, which I think speaks for itself, so I will say nothing about it but that you should read it because it's very cute.
Awww, this series just gets better and better. And that was a fun review! Nice work, past us!
Well, tune in next Reviewsday (that's Tuesday) for our review of Fire Force 10! Yay, Fire Force!!! We saw exactly one Fire Force cosplayer at Anime Expo, and we took a picture and showed it to our editor, and we were all like, "Why isn't this series more popular?" Check it out, you guys! I know it's not Soul Eater, but it's not supposed to be! Not liking a series because it's not like the author's last series is like saying, "Well, gosh, I can't like you. You're nothing like your older sibling (except for the ways where you're totally lazily copying him/her)."
Today I'm thankful for a fun review of Waiting for Spring, making pretty good progress on Fire Force, having time to watch an episode of anime, Fire Force cosplayers, and being fairly certain that our feline visitor didn't mark anything as his territory this morning.