Amagami SS+ 10 – The lack of Sae in a bear costume displeases me

Sae has never really been my favourite character, being a bit too timid – not that it is a bad trait, its just that Sae was too easily lead around by Junichi during parts of her original arc. It was a fascinating change to see Sea growing as a person, becoming far more decisive and with the ability to stand out of the crowd and deal with an increased level of attention. This week continued on from last week, with Sae being elected as the head of the founders festival committee. With the added workload we see Junichi having to take a backseat for significant periods of the episodes while Sae continues her transformation into someone who is beautiful, popular and competent at her job.

It was a curious episode with a lot less Junichi than Sae, which is where the tension lay – Junichi for his part both felt left out, but also upset that he is unable to help Sae with her own work. Junichi appears at first to think that having Sae as the committee president would lead to his girlfriend coming running to him for assistance. The problem is of course, that she appears fully competent at her job, taking on all the tasks required of her with her newfound confidence. There appears to be a gulf between Junichi and Sae, with Junichi wishing to be back in the days when she would have to rely on him. He does however have quite the brain wave during all this mopping, deciding to make a documentary of the festival preparation process, focussing on Sae as its star.

Things are not all they seem with Sae though, with her workload increasing almost exponentially, she is starting to feel the pressure and strain of being committee president. Although Sae reassures Junichi that everything is fine, he cant help but worry, and with some words of wisdom courtesy of everyone’s favourite Tsundere Tsukasa, he offers her his help. This seems to give Sae the confidence boost she needed, and she redoubles her efforts to finish the festivals planning and preparations. The festival is a resounding success – and, unlike in the previous series, Sae is capable of standing in front of a crowd in a rather sexy Santa outfit to welcome everyone and officially open the festivities. With the small detail of the festival out of the way it seems like our budding couple can finally have some precious private time. This leads us to jump forward 8 years, much like with the Tsukasa and Haruka arcs in the first series to see Junichi and Sae as a happy married couple, who already have a daughter the splitting image of Sae and with another child on its way.

I never really had much emotional attachment to this episode, which was a shame after all the effort put into the first half of Sae’s arc. I liked how Sae in last weeks episode, along with parts of this episode had clearly grown up – seeing her newfound confidence and ability to make her own decisions and importantly deal with her surging popularity was great. The bear costume at the beginning was also incredibly cut, and showed that while she may be more confident now, she was still the same cute, and occasionally shy Sae from the first series.

Unfortunately this episode lacked any real engagement with the characters, and for the most part they just went through the motions, rather than built on the progress made in last weeks episode. We had no drama, no real problems, nothing actually, which was a great shame. The narrators role was also scaled back this week, and while he did have a nice little of fourth-wall breaking, it just wasn’t enough. I did love the couple contest though, seeing Miya and Ai in cat costumes was great, and it was brilliant to see Sae get all touchy feely with Miya, tickling her and generally acting like a completely new person, which of course she is. So, while these little moments were great, they were few and far between, which is a shame because until now Amagami SS has been a great little show. Luckily next week sees the return of my favourite Amagami SS heroine – Haruka shall rise once again, and apparently bring out the ‘Sexy’ in the show according to the episode title.

Taking cute end cards to a whole new level.