Every picture in this post is of Misaki with a lollipop
Every anime season has its girls. Bishoujo shows give you gluttonous heaps of cuteness, harems pump crotch-face misunderstandings into the hallways of animated schools, and every once in a while some badass chick with cutoffs and guns ass-kicks her way to your heart. I was going to write something interesting about Hatsukoi Limited this week, because the wide-reaching strands of the story are starting to weave into a web, but I got slightly turned off-course by that girl for the spring season: Misaki Yamamoto.
You see, she’s the source of the interesting things that are happening. Long the “girl next door” in every sense of the word to poor personality-deprived Zaitsu, now this stone-cold fox with supposedly no desire for dudes has another lame-ass suitor, Koyoi’s beloved onii-chan. Now, let’s not get too hung up on the whole brocon/siscon thing and how it, like boobless girls, is on the surface made to be the freaky but undesirable fetish but of course its very presence in modern anime constitutes a ringing endorsement and custom fetish delivery to stinky otaku. I digress like fuck.
The elder Besshou is no more interesting than the younger Zaitsu, and has just as little concept of where his league is and when he’s out of it. To top it off for this poor sap, Misaki’s ditched her sexual disinterest in favor of his tactless, uncaring, lollipop-wielding best friend (who happens to be Kei’s older brother). And, tell me you ronery fuckers that you’ve never been here — she calls him to the restaurant to find out what she should do about her crush on crass-a-nova. FFFFFFFFFFF.
All of this matters because it’s the harbinger of the change of tone that every romantically focused anime must make before it becomes part of its genre. In love, everything isn’t breasts and roses, and tragedy is the name of the game. Here, we have both Besshou and Zaitsu, hopelessly hung up on the mesmerizing Misaki, and we’re already treated to the earliest tragic truth of the series: One of them — perhaps neither of them — will have her. Bummer.
Because let’s face it kids, Misaki’s pretty bangin. And she’d have to be. In an anime where the 14-year-olds cause lelangir confusing feelings (and cause pan-ups to be pasted together into pinups, apparently), the 16 or 17-year-old (maximum age in anime, deshou?) can’t just be bomb, she’s gotta be nuclear.
I’m starting to wonder now, how much Misaki will be a character, how much we’ll see into her head (like the unprecedented tsundere-POV of Kei) or whether she’ll just continue to be an object of desire, a veritable walking nosebleed for the male characters of the show. Regardless, this is animation, so I think we can all rest assured she’ll stay sexful. How her courtship fares, well that might not be as positive but a rosy outlook for love doesn’t make for good TV so let’s see what kind of damage she can do.
