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Ah, the desperate outcry for universal and comprehensive sex-ed has literary merit.

Sex gets a lot of its mystique from distance, it seems. You hear about it in rumors, you watch porn and jerk it in secret, and only once you have surmounted the roadblock that is your virginity do you find it within yourself to release the breath you've been holding about it throughout the duration of your ignorance. Rarely, so rarely it's almost criminal, do we see, in these drawings we laugh at and in life, sex talked about so forthrightly by virgins.

Then Hanazono and Kazoe start meeting each other in their Science ... Room. They have interesting conversations.

The virginal enthrallment with es-ee-batsu is certainly present in these characters. ‘Tis the whole premise of the manga, but the perceptions their classmates hold of them, which stem from the uniqueness of their respective lifestyles, have kept them from engaging with the subject like the rest of their peers. They've been withheld from it, for one - each has a certain reputation that invites a little distance - and for another, they are distinctly lacking the typical reservations one may have in exploring it.

It has been a pleasant time watching a friendship blossom between these two misfits as Kazoe attempts to learn. Her innocent fascination, and Hanazono's knowledgeable yet awkward attempts to reckon with it make for a funny character dynamic. And despite the differences in the breadths of their sexual knowledge (breadths, not depths, for their knowledge may be vast but inexperience leaves it shallow, how cute) it seems they have more in common than not: a strong sense of justice and bluntness - basically, they are both wholly unapologetic about who they are, even if they know it blends poorly with who everyone else is. Yet underlying that, they also share in their confinement within boxes society has put them: of purity and of the illicit. That’s the heart of why I can write about this as an endearing SOL manga with a unique premise, as opposed to an innocence-corruption kink-pandering seinen or a health class textbook. The real kicker of this show is, despite Hanazono's significant consciousness of how his school sees him, he's able to find the relief of having someone who can really see you, whether "you" is the dick attached to you or "you" is the person lying beneath the pervasive rumors that have kept you from a normal high school experience. When you see how easy the overly-rational banter comes between the two of them, and when you hear yourself laughing at it, it becomes clear that their friendship is less about easy-access condom intel or high IQ debates about the cultural sensitivity of boob discourse, and is more about the comfort each gets from a friend who cares more about facing them than they do about the upkeep of their image.

As that wholesome, unique friendship with unique complications continued its development into something complicated, I found myself intrigued, and exhaling out of my nostrils more in turn. The level of nuance the mangaka presented us with when they finally got down to it indicates a dash of self-awareness in the subject manner - how closely intertwined these intimate acts they describe are with romance, even with their naïve approach to it highlighting the distance. The academic detachment with which they speak on the subject only temporarily puts off the feelings something so personal is inevitably bound to evoke.

The romance does come in hard and fast at the end though (good Lord), with limited build-up in the beginning. The drama suffers for this, seeming shallower and more whimsical than it ought to. The series getting axed didn’t help that much, as that escalation had no point at which to culminate into something satisfying, and the post-mortem extras felt like consolation prizes for my troubles. Reading the series didn’t feel much like trouble at all though - after all, drama was never the selling part of it, and through that lens, the drama we got was the real consolation prize itself, and the series as a whole was still what it always was: just a short compilation of cute shit.

Hanazono's got a pretty trash hairstyle, but the art and character designs taken as a whole are unique and adequately screenshot-able. Notably, it's very consistent, which is something one wouldn't expect to find with subject matter as seemingly crude as this. (I'm thinking specifically about Virgin Extinction Island, if you're wondering.) The art doesn’t detract from the story, and there are certainly times when more effortfully drawn scenes make the emotions feel more poignant, and thus it adds. So that’s pretty swag.

This is a time killer, but it’s a fair one. It is indeed worth the minimal time you’d expect to allot to it. Now, whether that's enough justification to embark on this brief semi-deadpan high school sex-ed comic journey is up to you - my job was simply to tell you it was kinda fun.

Just a note that this review is not entirely free of the lightest of manga spoilers.

Anime fans (myself included) are guilty of colloquially tacking the “fujoshi” label to anyone who enjoys consuming stories depicting romance between men. In some fundamental sense, it’s true, but with such broad usage we forget that the word translates to “rotten girl” and that the people it ought to describe are indeed rotten fetishists of relationships that too often are violent, exploitative, incestuous and/or non-consenting in which the fairer sex happens to be uninvolved.

Such a distressing (and rather unflinchingly vocal and parasitical) status quo makes it easy for something ... like Doukyuusei to fly under the radar as some garden variety...um...that.

What an egregious offense.

This franchise will absolutely ruin your mouth—my teeth rots from its sweetness and my jaw aches from smiling so damn much. The only offensive thing about it is the fact that such beautiful romance blossomed so realistically right in front of me that it feels that much more out of my reach.

Strangers Kusakabe and Sajou start to notice each other, each stained in the light pouring through their windows of their shared classroom. They sing to the tune of cicadas and new beginnings. The rest is history.

These boys do not steamroll their ways into each other’s arms—there’s no self immolation or collateral damage (beyond Harasen, more on that later) or ruination—Doukyuusei chooses to celebrate the stumble, the blushing moment when the internal chaos halts for a minute and everything remains unclear except the fact that you’re in love.

You’ve read the plot of Doukyuusei before: honor roll and rock n’ roll get tangled up in fate’s inept hands. The writing’s poetic enough to make the cliche work for them.

By “poetic enough” I refer to its mastery over awkwardness. It hits amazingly close to home when Kusakabe idly chats about a poem to put off getting to the point only to bulldoze straight to it soon after, when Sajou affirms in meek I-don’t-know’s in lieu of apologizing for running away, when Kusakabe has no issue spilling to his teacher that he’s tryna bone a guy but tomatoes at the notion of said guy being his first love.

This relationship really feels soulmate-y, and it’s not because there’s some arbitrary red string linking their pinkies. The movie totally rejects such an idea, joining the two characters by chunky yellow ribbon, one frequently cut and retied together, only unchanging in color. You root for the relationship with full confidence that they’ll get through it somehow because they so fervently work toward a middle ground it’s only natural that they would. As a regular consumer of shounen ai I can only lament where we went wrong such that cousin incest became less surprising than mere classmates, such that loving one of the same sex came from a place of dependence, addiction and indulgence rather than from the beautiful heart that beats in every frame of this movie.

All the praise I give Doukyuusei for being non-contentious is seemingly upturned by a certain stinkyhead who very much embodies the “forbidden love” aspect that’s so detestably endemic.

At the very least i can say that Harasen, a thirty something washed up music teacher harboring painfully pathetic feelings for our resident scholar is exactly that—pathetic. His affections are purely catalystic. He’s taken seriously by Kusakabe, not necessarily because he has a chance, rather, Kusakabe regards it as a threat because the feelings exist at all. For all of Harasen’s efforts at repression, for all the personal strife he feels at his own pedophilic tendencies, he ends up being a mere hill the doukyuuseis climb only to zoom down with more speed than they had before.

Even if he is such a nonentity though, his role has still done its damage in making gay relationships seem illicit or scandalous. In the manga, the teacher-student relations don’t even stop there: Harasen gets his proper ending and there’s a whole other couple walking the same halls, going through the same motions.

If I had to make a case for such relationships, though I hesitate a lot in doing so, I’d argue that rather than something, for lack of a better word, trashy, like Why the Hell Are You Here Teacher which fetishizes the age gap and indulges in its wrongness, this franchise opts for providing real meaning to the characters involved in the relationship being in different places in their lives, much like After the Rain. Such commentary is actually even more welcome considering this show is about gay relationships - the adults especially have to deal with reorganizing themselves around an identity that wasn’t so easily accepted by society in their heyday. That argument is weakened by the fact that the characters do really end up romantically involved, but at least in a narrative respect, it’s one I think worth entertaining. (That said, most of what I said here hardly has much to do with the anime movie at all. Whoops.)

On appearances, Doukyuusei is the prettiest BL animated thing I’ve ever watched. The conventional attractiveness of Yuri on Ice and the paradoxical vintage modernity of Banana Fish are still third and second to the light handed aquarelle I can stare into forever and feel sheer summer romance staring back at me.

It was a serious blessing to drink in the ethereal watercolor, the delicate stroke of the lines, the cutie lil character models that so animatedly bounce and wiggle and trip and slouch their way across my screen it makes me personally feel as though I’m missing out on youth (hardly moving as is and lugging myself as though my mass is a chore whenever I do; quarantine’s been tough on the lot of us.)

The OST isn’t anything too special to my untrained ears, but I really really enjoyed the way this show sounds — the voice acting is stellar for sure, ideally capturing the franticness, the playfulness, the awkwardness both possess in spades. No complaints felt passionately enough to mention.

There’s no real reason to avoid this movie. For good romance, for decent rep, and for a good freaking time, do give this one a shot.

For the record, I posted this review on my friend’s Instagram, and it was seen there first. I didn’t steal it, I wrote it. Check it out: instagram.com/neverdaijoubu.