Anime romances are pretty notorious for barely getting to the confession stage. It is almost a miracle when a sweet teen couple share even a kiss. Needless to say, with the glacial pace Taishou Otome Fairytale was moving, not to mention both protagonists suffering from excessive blushing at the best of times, I wasn’t expecting much in the way of romantic development.
So I was quite surprised when they have an honest conversation about marriage now that Yuzuki has turned 15 and then casually, and without much fanfare, share a kiss.
Definitely less surprising was the explosively red blush that nearly blew both their heads off after the kiss.
I mean, Taishou Otome Fairytale is still an anime afterall.
Taishou Otome Fairytale is at its best with Yuzuki and Tamahiko.
Weirdly though, Yuzuki and Tamahiko have kind of acclimatised to one another in this episode. Sure, more seasons have passed and the two are now working in pretty good sync with Tamahiko also helping with some of the household chores, those he’s able to with his arm, and Yuzuki seems to have learned to take breaks and not over-tax herself.
It’s a sweet rhythm they are in and with Tamahiko finally looking toward a future you could almost see Taishou Otome Fairytale ending on a happy note. Except that he threw in the famous words of awaiting a response from his father. Does anyone honestly believe Tamahiko is going to get a response from his father that doesn’t send him back into soul crushing despair?
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Anyway, the majority of this episode isn’t actually about the central couple. Its actually about the kids in the town who, led by Atsumi’s brothers, have all decided that Tamhiko is a pretty good teacher and they are rocking up to his house quite frequently for lessons.
As Tamahiko observes after the first few lessons, the kids actually multiply as the days go by.
On the one hand, that’s kind of awesome that after a year or so of living in the village Tamahiko is finally getting to know people and contributing something to the community. On the other hand he’s got a whole bunch of kids who have more or less taken up residence in his home during the day. As usual, it is hard to tell if he’s pleased by this development or just too shy to tell them to go away.
Naturally, Taishou Otome Fairytale has also brought Atsumi back around. While she takes a small (very small) step toward kind of maybe making up for her behaviour in the last episode, I still don’t like this character much so found it hard to get behind her drama this week as she frantically searched for her brother in the final act of the episode. Not that I wanted anything to happen to her brother, I just didn’t really feel bad that Atsumi was upset.
That’s the problem when you make a character behave in a fairly unforgiveable manner. it is difficult later on to really empathise with them when things go wrong for them.
Also, the overall solution presented to the crisis in Taishou Otome Fairytale this week very much seemed far too simplistic. The younger brother had some genuine concerns about moving away for work and even Tamahiko admitted he’d never actually done that but more or less painted a very rosy picture of the best possible outcome for him.
Though this anime took much the same approach with Tamako’s issues.
As much as Taishou Otome Fairytale is identifying some real social concerns in the era as well as persona dramas for the characters, it doesn’t want to deal with the serious subject matter all that seriously beause that would definitely break the romantic slice-of-lie feel it has going.
Still, episode 7 has Tamahiko and Yuzuki kiss. They are so adorable when they are honest with each other and are super cute together. Now if we can just get some ore of the drama out of the way and just let them be.
Images from: Taishou Otome Fairytale. Dir. J Hatori. SynergySP. 2021
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Karandi James
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