I enjoyed watching more details of life in a snow covered place.

I wish they’d shown more detail on some interesting snow festival food or games.

Corn dogs with sugar just don’t seem that interesting to me, but I did have to look up amazake “sweek sake”, and there was a whole 0.5 seconds of what I believe was Kitami (Hokkaido) onion soup with corn.

Other than that, the ridiculously hot girl flirting with easily flustered protagonist guy plot seems pretty standard, as others have pointed out.

So, I know I said I was going to stop watching this show and read the manga instead, but I had to go into work obscenely early today for a meeting with some EU colleagues. As I was on the train ride in, it was cancelled. So, I decided to have some coffee and watch episode 2 of this show to help me wake and warm up.

Overall, my impression of this show has not changed from episode 1. Seems pretty standard, but just reskin a summer festival that you have seen 100 times before to a winter festival. In that respect, there is a bit of novelty since they are doing things like making snowmen instead of watching fireworks or playing with sparklers.

Overall, there were a bunch of classic manga/anime romcom story elements we checked off the list this episode (in no particular order):

• First up was the male lead downplaying his relationship with the female lead to others. In this case it was his grandmother. I really don’t get this one personally and have never understood the motivation of denying your friendship or relationship with somebody else.
• Second, the indirect kiss. Using a corndog? The corndog strategy was a first for me, so it was a bold choice.
• Third was having a girl visit your room. This one was surprisingly tame as there was not any searching for dirty magazines or anything like that.

Honestly, there are others, but I am not really awake enough yet to go into it. I don’t mean to be overly harsh on this series. There was a time in which I think I might have enjoyed this series a lot more. However, after enough years of watching/reading series like this, I feel like I already know how the whole story will play out. So, I am for real going to switch to the manga at this point…for real…I promise…(help me)