My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999

Episode 4

Meeting new people can be intimidating in any context. Meeting people you already know can be a similarly tricky proposition in this age of long-fostered online friendships. Like logically, you know your social media mutual isn't actually the anime girl they use as a profile pic, but there can still be an odd, if inconsequential, disconnect when you confirm that in real life because, hey, that anime girl is the face you've been looking at over all the years you've been chatting with them! Add in the fact that no one acts 100% the same way IRL that they do online, plus the intertwining relationships with other people who might also be around, and we can see why anyone would get nervous. Such a walking disaster like Akane doesn't stand a chance.

This week's episode of My Love Story With Yamada-kun at Lv999 is nearly wholly dedicated to Akane navigating social situations with the semi-new group of people she's getting to know via the guild's offline meetup. And there are just a few moments where Akane's ineptitude goes from charming to frustrating. This is mainly about her shockingly staunch inability to grasp that Runa is not, in fact, the player behind Rurihime when it's been evident since the last episode that it's Eita. The misunderstanding doesn't last too much longer into this episode, but it also doesn't contribute to what the dynamic between all these characters looks to be moving forward, so it just makes for a stalling, aggravating inclusion.

Once Akane finally gets the truth through her head, we can explore the dynamics between her and the guild members. Eita has the most unique multitude of facets, with his insistence that his Rurihime persona isn't simply his avatar for playing the game but a complex exercise in roleplay and self-generated character appreciation which I feel like I've seen at least partially expressed by my mutuals who snap and post pictures of their Final Fantasy XIV characters in different outfits all day. Disconnects in personality between the online and the offline and how we read ourselves versus others have already been a running theme in Yamada-kun at Lv999. So it fits with that motif when we see how Eita can be so densely interrogative of his representative preferences yet utterly fail to clock the kind of person Akane is as he's talking at her.

The interlinking events of this group outing elaborate on Akane for our benefit as much as the other characters. Eita, who ironically should know all about not trusting initial appearances, regards Akane as seemingly mature, while Yamada and we have enough experience to know how childish she is. That's apparent in how she finds herself in the crosshairs of Runa, an actual child, regarding her slowly unearthing feelings for Yamada, a teenager. Akane going all doki-doki for a high schooler was already lowkey sad. Now getting swept up into a petty, childish love triangle is doing little to help her beat the childishness allegations.

Right now, Akane, even to herself, is struggling to conclude if she's romantically interested in Yamada or merely captivated and distracted by his good looks. And her efforts to mitigate the situation into a more "appropriate" slant mostly seem to manifest in her forcing out signifiers to seem more adult than she is. She finds out that Yamada is living alone and not eating anything resembling home-cooked meals, so she loads him up with containers full of her leftovers. The irony is that it's impulsive and self-sacrificing in its own immature way.

Given how badly Akane reacted to her breakup and how we see her acting towards Yamada now, she needs to maintain some transactional connection with others to feel validated. We also saw her loading up the guild's item box earlier to feel like she was contributing something. I know this show has "Love Story" right in the title, with this episode directly focusing on Akane starting to quantify her possibly romantic feelings for Yamada. However, I wonder if the actual long-term point of this show will be Akane using her interactions with Yamada as a vector to grow more self-actualized as a real adult, leveling herself up more than any love story.

It's a simply-set episode that still leaves us with that much more nuanced understanding of Akane's character. Yamada gets allusions to his arc and the idea that his disinterest in romance isn't inherent but instead stems from some past trauma. That's teased tantalizingly enough that I'm curious, especially since it gives him a potential path for growth alongside all the growing-up Akane needs to do. I hope it has more going on than the flashbacks indicate since "Bad experience with a girl left him unable to love" feels a bit trite compared to the different details Akane has that I've already read too much into. But we'll burn that bridge when we come to it. For this episode, as I could expect from Yamada-kun at Lv999 at this point, they got plenty of mileage out of Akane just sitting around talking with people, occasionally making an ass out of herself.

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.