This all happens surprisingly easily (by anime standards, at least); although a couple of their mutual friends do their bit to get the pair of them together, it turns out that Kaoru has already made her decision that she wants to spend her Christmas Eve with Tachibana... not that she seemed to have thought about telling him until he makes a ham-fisted attempt to ask her out on a date himself.
With a date all arranged, the whole thing pretty much turns into the two of them hanging out as per usual, aside from Tachibana's worries as he gets a glimpse of the huge erection that Kaoru wanted to show him (get your minds out of the gutter, people). Of course, no romance-based anime would be complete without a confession of love in monologue form, and so the normally tomboy-ish Kaoru shows her softer, more feminine side in confessing her love before Tachibana reciprocates. Thus, they all live happily ever after, and our protagonist even gets to spend the night with Kaoru, although sadly we don't get to see what her hair looks like in the more, which I was genuinely a little curious about.
After ending up kind of irked by Amagami SS' first arc, largely because Haruka was clearly crazy in the coconut, this second arc of the series certainly sat a little more easily with me simply because I actually liked Kaoru - she was fun, but not in a deranged way, and her dynamic with Tachibana made far, far more sense than Haruka's ever did. Unfortunately, it's perhaps the natural feel to this pairing that also made it rather vanilla - the drama injected into the story fell pretty flat and was forgotten quickly even by the story itself, and the climax to the arc as a whole was just very... normal. For a guy who was licking this girl's belly button in a public library a couple of weeks ago, a quiet and sane confession of love feels a little odd, but oh well, this arc was still an improvement even if it proved to be unspectacular.
The drama was better integrated in the game. She doesn't get over it in one day, he has to comfort her more than once, and in bed, she compares her need for him to her mom's need for another man in her life. I would have liked to see that instead of irrelevant cameos by other characters.
ReplyDeleteThe game also ends with her taking him to meet her parents (including stepdad). It's a shame they ended the episode when they did.