It’s also one of the few times our leads didn’t overthink themselves miserable and that’s a nice touch too. Sex when there wasn’t supposed to be sex absolutely happens and it was refreshing to see two people who care about one another just too into one another to stop.

Yeah, females are allowed to have sex drives, or not, and shouldn’t be judged for it.Īnd if hormones do get out of control and our leads sleep together, which they do, it’s treated absolutely respectfully and tastefully in a way I wasn’t really expecting. And there’s no judgement here, which is really important and makes this so special. If anything, Kaguya is far more the instigator of, well, anything at all (ladies, I tell you true that men are utterly weak to you wearing their clothing). What I absolutely love about this arc is that it addresses the fact that hormones and teenagers are both wildly unpredictable and, while Shirogane is more than willing to accommodate Kaguya, she’s got a lot of worries about the stability of their relationship when they go to separate colleges. To which the answer is a resounding… maybe? So naturally, like many a comedy before it, the narrative contrives to have them end up alone at Shirogane’s new place. The boys start being boys, but in the midst of being very honest about things, eye-openingly so, Shirogane might be overheard by Kaguya, and what’s she to do with all this locker talk?Īs it turns out, she hilariously derails the final arc of the series in favour of having a tea party that’s all about whether or not she and Shirogane should do it. Yes, sex is in the air, or at least it might be.

Which ends up being a real story arc, despite starting off with Ishigami talking about boobs. Once a cat enters the picture, it’s basically an excuse for Kaguya to go full tsundere on it and so we have an utter charmer of a cat along with some of the funniest exhortations of feline violence ever (Kaguya’s line about what would happen if they were in a more lawless country is a series all-timer I was dying).Įven better, not only does the cat become a recurring character, but he ends up integrated in the main plot of this volume in a major way. Mangaka taking on cats is one of my favourite things and so it goes here, with the first belter of a story in this volume being about Kaguya’s deep hatred of cats compared to dogs and the whole thing leading off with the disturbing implication of an extended Fujiwara clan.

But now the lingering question remains… if love is war, then what’s sex, exactly? From cats to suspicious brothers to misunderstood head pats, there’s a lot going on at Shuchiin these days, but that starts to fall by the wayside as the spectre of hormones begins to swirl around our dear Shirogane and Kaguya.

Kaguya vol 22