When Will Ayumu Make His Move?

Episode 12

At long last, we arrive at the conclusion of yet another season of anime, and this is the way When Will Ayumu Make His Move? ends: Not with a confession, but a…well, even saying “whimper” here feels misleading, since that implies that the show didn't always play things so soft and unfocused. A “shrug”, maybe? A “half-hearted nod of passive recognition,” perhaps? I don't know. All I'm trying to say is that, despite being the season finale, this last episode of Ayumu was much the same as every other episode that came before it, which is to say that it sure did exist as a thing in my brain for the twenty-or-so minutes it took to watch. It's already starting to evaporate into thin air, though, even as I type this, and lord knows if I will be able to remember anything about this show come this time next Tuesday.

It doesn't help that, despite kind-of-sort-of setting up Ayumu and Urushi's vacation phone chat as some sort of emotional climax last week, the scene barely amounts to anything at all, as short and free of substance as it is. Even the central joke doesn't work, because it revolves around Ayumu accidentally giving Urushi the ol' “The moon is beautiful” line in complete sincerity. Not only is Urushi being mildly flustered over Ayumu's unintentional romanticism too played out and low-impact to be especially cute,at this point, I also just cannot believe that any person in Ayumu's shoes wouldn't be completely aware of the obscenely overdone “The moon is beautiful” cliché. Maybe that's just my bias as a fan of anime—I guess I can't say how often the phrase comes up in real conversation amongst modern-day Japanese romantics—but the point is that the show can't convincingly sell the bit either way, so it just doesn't work.

Then, an inordinate amount of time is spent on Urushi trying to fetch her lost good-luck charm from a cat, which culminates in what I suppose is meant to be a big moment of Urushi realizing how much Ayumu means to her, which is…fine? It's fine. Like I've been saying, the core problem of Ayumu, compared to a series like Takagi-san, is that the characters' more typical ages and personality types in the former series means that their romantic hijinks lack all of the organic and charming clumsiness of the latter. These kids are, like, a year or two away from being fully-fledged adults, so watching them come to terms with their ridiculously obvious crushes on one another isn't anything special.

Besides, the show completely chickens out in the home stretch; there isn't even any move-making on Ayumu's part, despite the fact that he (technically) beat Urushi! We already know they like each other, their friends already know, and the two of them basically act like a couple already, so the only meaningful development we were ever bound to get with this setup was for the kids to at least verbalize their feelings, and When Will Ayumu Make His Move? can't even commit to that. I'm fine waiting three seasons for Takagi and Nishikata to admit they like each other because that's a really big milestone on their individual journeys towards young adulthood. With Urushi and Ayumu, it's almost annoying that they can't just figure themselves out and get to the next level of their relationships already.

I know I've spent a lot of this final review complaining, so I want to end things by reminding y'all that When Will Ayumu Make His Move? isn't a terrible anime; it's just an aggressively average one, to the point where I don't know what even diehard romcom fans would get out of it that isn't being done much better by a dozen different competitors. Take my word for it: You'd be better off just watching old Takagi-san reruns, instead.

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When Will Ayumu Make His Move? is currently streaming on HIDIVE. James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.