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krpalmerAfter continuing on from a cliffhanger appropriate for the kind of story it is was delayed by a volume of short stories (and wanting to finish the Crest of the Stars omnibus first, too), I felt ready to pick up the seventh “regular” volume of Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki to start reading it. As I did that, though, a special sort of uncertainty was emerging again within me. The story did seem to be getting closer to a moment anticipated from its opening, when “self-improvement through game-like challenges” would narrow down to “get a girlfriend,” and for once I wasn’t quite sure I’d just be taking things as they came.
It didn’t take that long after I’d started seeing opinions from other fans online for me to start thinking I just didn’t seem as dedicated as a good many of them looked to be at insisting fictional characters had to be paired off romantically with other characters in their stories. That impression has lasted from Star Wars novels (it wasn’t the only thing that kept me from getting back into them when I got back into the movies, but it was a factor all the same) to Harry Potter (some of the handful of positive Star Wars fans who helped me get back into the movies were also into those books in those more innocent days) to quite a few other properties (having reached the perhaps unfortunate position of steering away from “single-property fandoms,” I may be too influenced by hair-raising anecdotes). In trying not to let this influence too many conclusions about myself, I’ve considered how, to make matters worse, when a story appears straightforward about setting up a romance without “too much” in the way of preliminary tease, I can find myself feeling gooey and sentimental about that romance where others just fume how phoney the whole thing is in that particular case.
With Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki, though, I hadn’t quite been thinking “each of the cute high school girls introduced via anime-manga style colour plates at the start of the first volume is getting her own coverage to appeal to different slices of an audience, so narrowing my focus too much will only lead to frustration.” I’d noticed the particular way the main character Tomozaki kept thinking about one of those girls, and in noticing that I’d started to wonder if that amounted to “deciding how things had to be” in advance the way other people seem to. That, in turn, seemed to open up “so what happens if things don’t turn out the way that seems obvious for you?”
In any case, the seventh volume began with Tomozaki’s enigmatic mentor-and-challenger Aoi Hinami getting him to the point of narrowing down to just two girlfriend candidates, and he picked who seemed the most established to me. I suppose that got me thinking again of how it might now be easier to miss in the story the characters he hadn’t named, even if part of that might have been remembering how the character list at the start of each volume doesn’t use the nickname one girl goes by (it could have taken the anime adaptation for me to really understand where the name had come from).
As for the sort of larger events that can deflect me in other stories from a mere focus on “relationship matters,” a familiar-enough school festival is in final preparation. Tomozaki has to try and get ready for a comedy skit with “Mimimi” Nanami, despite their interactions starting to get awkward. He’s also working with Fuka Kikuchi on a fantasy play that’ll have Aoi acting in it, and as Kikuchi struggles with how to improve the character Aoi will be playing they begin to poke more into the “perfect heroine’s” background.
When trying to interview Aoi herself only produces “snake oil, snake oil, and more snake oil,” they start to track down people who knew her in the past. The first of them is a high school boy, and Tomozaki just so happens to get uneasy about how friendly he seems towards Kikuchi even as he bridges them over to another person who knew Aoi all the way back in grade school. All of it more continues to hint than explain, but in any case the story does go on to poke a bit at a certain idea suspicious interpretations might have seen it as pushing towards, namely that Tomozaki’s “self-improvement” is just a code for “doing things the way everyone else does because that’s the way it’s supposed to be done.” When it starts to seem as if Kikuchi is pushing herself out of a comfort zone for the sake of being social, Tomozaki helps set her up on Twitter so that she can interact with other fans of the “Michael Andi books” she was first introduced as into. I do have to admit to a few “now what could possibly go wrong with having to deal with fans online?” thoughts, but in any case the school festival is getting under way.
The comedy skit and the play go well, but at the very moment Tomozaki seems to have made a decision and is about to declare it the play itself can be seen as a “it’s not just his decision” caution. I’m aware “rebounds” and “redirections” could have been seen as possibly coming into play, but in reading the dramatic climax all but compulsively things did seem to work out in a satisfying way for me.
With that, the slight sense of ominousness that had seemed to have been there from the beginning when Aoi told Tomozaki “getting a girlfriend” is just a “mid-range goal” turned all of a sudden into the casual comment that regardless of “romance novels,” “movies,” and “impressions online,” making a relationship last is a new challenge. Still, with the senses of peculiarity I’ve already mentioned in mind, I suppose I’m at least able to imagine those who could have seen things a different way to begin with now be finding reasons for dissatisfaction, and there is the question of how the story might continue and how I’ll take what might happen. In any case, I had noticed a few months ago an announcement the anime adaptation would be continuing. This seventh novel would be a significant place for it to get up to, although that would mean “three episodes per volume” where the original adaptation had managed four.
It didn’t take that long after I’d started seeing opinions from other fans online for me to start thinking I just didn’t seem as dedicated as a good many of them looked to be at insisting fictional characters had to be paired off romantically with other characters in their stories. That impression has lasted from Star Wars novels (it wasn’t the only thing that kept me from getting back into them when I got back into the movies, but it was a factor all the same) to Harry Potter (some of the handful of positive Star Wars fans who helped me get back into the movies were also into those books in those more innocent days) to quite a few other properties (having reached the perhaps unfortunate position of steering away from “single-property fandoms,” I may be too influenced by hair-raising anecdotes). In trying not to let this influence too many conclusions about myself, I’ve considered how, to make matters worse, when a story appears straightforward about setting up a romance without “too much” in the way of preliminary tease, I can find myself feeling gooey and sentimental about that romance where others just fume how phoney the whole thing is in that particular case.
With Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki, though, I hadn’t quite been thinking “each of the cute high school girls introduced via anime-manga style colour plates at the start of the first volume is getting her own coverage to appeal to different slices of an audience, so narrowing my focus too much will only lead to frustration.” I’d noticed the particular way the main character Tomozaki kept thinking about one of those girls, and in noticing that I’d started to wonder if that amounted to “deciding how things had to be” in advance the way other people seem to. That, in turn, seemed to open up “so what happens if things don’t turn out the way that seems obvious for you?”
In any case, the seventh volume began with Tomozaki’s enigmatic mentor-and-challenger Aoi Hinami getting him to the point of narrowing down to just two girlfriend candidates, and he picked who seemed the most established to me. I suppose that got me thinking again of how it might now be easier to miss in the story the characters he hadn’t named, even if part of that might have been remembering how the character list at the start of each volume doesn’t use the nickname one girl goes by (it could have taken the anime adaptation for me to really understand where the name had come from).
As for the sort of larger events that can deflect me in other stories from a mere focus on “relationship matters,” a familiar-enough school festival is in final preparation. Tomozaki has to try and get ready for a comedy skit with “Mimimi” Nanami, despite their interactions starting to get awkward. He’s also working with Fuka Kikuchi on a fantasy play that’ll have Aoi acting in it, and as Kikuchi struggles with how to improve the character Aoi will be playing they begin to poke more into the “perfect heroine’s” background.
When trying to interview Aoi herself only produces “snake oil, snake oil, and more snake oil,” they start to track down people who knew her in the past. The first of them is a high school boy, and Tomozaki just so happens to get uneasy about how friendly he seems towards Kikuchi even as he bridges them over to another person who knew Aoi all the way back in grade school. All of it more continues to hint than explain, but in any case the story does go on to poke a bit at a certain idea suspicious interpretations might have seen it as pushing towards, namely that Tomozaki’s “self-improvement” is just a code for “doing things the way everyone else does because that’s the way it’s supposed to be done.” When it starts to seem as if Kikuchi is pushing herself out of a comfort zone for the sake of being social, Tomozaki helps set her up on Twitter so that she can interact with other fans of the “Michael Andi books” she was first introduced as into. I do have to admit to a few “now what could possibly go wrong with having to deal with fans online?” thoughts, but in any case the school festival is getting under way.
The comedy skit and the play go well, but at the very moment Tomozaki seems to have made a decision and is about to declare it the play itself can be seen as a “it’s not just his decision” caution. I’m aware “rebounds” and “redirections” could have been seen as possibly coming into play, but in reading the dramatic climax all but compulsively things did seem to work out in a satisfying way for me.
With that, the slight sense of ominousness that had seemed to have been there from the beginning when Aoi told Tomozaki “getting a girlfriend” is just a “mid-range goal” turned all of a sudden into the casual comment that regardless of “romance novels,” “movies,” and “impressions online,” making a relationship last is a new challenge. Still, with the senses of peculiarity I’ve already mentioned in mind, I suppose I’m at least able to imagine those who could have seen things a different way to begin with now be finding reasons for dissatisfaction, and there is the question of how the story might continue and how I’ll take what might happen. In any case, I had noticed a few months ago an announcement the anime adaptation would be continuing. This seventh novel would be a significant place for it to get up to, although that would mean “three episodes per volume” where the original adaptation had managed four.