My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999

Episode 7

Navigating Akane's neuroses has been a regular feature of My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999, but the other side of our could-be couple, the titular guy himself, has been decidedly more opaque. We're given glimpses of something happening between some girl and him when he was younger, some sort of implication that his irrepressible popularity causes social problems for girls who actually try to leave the orbit of his fan club and get personally closer with him. Exactly how everything shook out remains unclarified, but Yamada's response, as we witness in interactions in this episode, seems to have been to utterly shut out even considering the possibility of romantic intent from any woman who speaks to him.

It's a somewhat different take than I'm used to seeing from the ol' "uncomfortable around women" type of guy who pops up in romantic comedies like this one. Technically Yamada has no issues with girls, he just can't allow himself to understand that they're regularly flirting up a storm with him on account of his incredible gamer-guy smolder. It'd almost be easy to read him as aromantic if this Love Story weren't explicitly a romance. But we still get a read on Yamada's preferred parlance of interactions, in how he's able to entertain an actual conversation with his classmate Tsubaki, even as she's being sharply critical of him because it's on the subject of the games he's inclined to engage with. Is this on account of games having clear win-lose conditions, indicating objectives he can pursue apart from the nebulous rules of interacting with others and their feelings? Again, we don't have enough to know yet, but it speaks volumes that we can speculate this much anyway about a character whose default depiction can seem so blank at first glance.

Basking in the quiet questionableness of Yamada himself forms the functions of much of this week's episode. Following him in his temporary escape from Akane's apartment at the end of the previous one, we flip to his more subdued take on dealings apart from Akane's human disaster elements. Heck, the narrative just puts Akane and Runa to sleep by the time Yamada returns to the apartment so we can have him sit in stillness compared to last week's quick-cut candy-coated chaos. Compared to someone who blurts out all her feelings constantly, Yamada's ambiguity towards situations invites us to wonder about him the same way he wonders about Akane, recognizing that she put her hair up after worrying about smacking him in the face with it before he unclips it as she sleeps for reasons even he doesn't know. Yamada possessed some measure of attraction and romance, he simply hasn't allowed himself the vocabulary to express it.

Akane makes for an appropriate ideation of his evolving feelings for a number of reasons. Okay, "appropriate" might not be the best word, given that ever-present age gap between them, but that's actually one component of why it works. Being apart from the school-age cliques and politics that would result in girls at Yamada's school being ostracized if they got too close to him means he could theoretically be with Akane without worrying about hurting her as a result. Akane is also open and straightforward not just with her feelings, but in how she expresses them. As confirmed by her ex-boyfriend who pops up in this episode and is reinforced with the guild's plans by the end, Akane is insistent on codifying her relationships with others via transactions. She supplies her loved ones with a steady stream of home-made food, and goes to great lengths to pay people back for computer parts and repairs she's otherwise told not to worry about. Might these not fulfill the same sort of hard-coded signifiers that Yamada prefers about games over other people's more nebulous interactions?

These are all only potential compatibility points that also don't exactly ring as "healthy" aspects for either Akane or Yamada, but that's part of the whole growing process that comes with growing closer together in stories like this one. It's a lot of pondering of personality points wrapped up in this anime's usual simple situations like finishing computer repairs or preparing for a school festival. It means the direction is taking it comparatively easier to how wild things were going last week, but there are still some great touches to the more understated artistry of this one. The opening segment goes with an interesting choice to focus on a lack of focus on faces, highlighting Yamada's difficulties directly interacting with people in his more distressed state. We linger on touches like the omelet that Akane and Runa made for Yamada before he got back, or the amusing little "Out Of Order" sign taped to Akane's malfunctioning computer. It sets this episode apart from the other ones while still clarifying the craft behind it.

It means that even with all the ambiguity around the characters' growing emotions, we still come away with a feeling of having leveled up just a bit more in this week's Yamada-kun at Lv999. It's even initiated a new plot-line, with the guild's participation in the festival and Akane's "sponsorship" of it. That could provide some interesting intersection with Yamada's school life, especially as this one shows off connections with his classmates like the aforementioned Tsubaki. It leaves us with confidence that the story will follow up on filling out details about Yamada if we just have patience with it.

Rating:

My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris is keeping busy keeping up with the new anime season and is excited to have you along. You can also find him writing about other stuff over on his blog, as well as spamming fanart retweets on his Twitter, for however much longer that lasts.