Manga-ka to Assistant-san to Episode 9
What They Say:
A hilarious slice of life comedy that leisurely depicts the day-to-day life of manga artist Aito Yuuki and his assistant, Ashisu Sahoto!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
One of the things we haven’t seen much is Aito being social as he generally seems like he wouldn’t be able to handle such things. So it is a surprise when we see him and Mihari out with a group of “friends” at the start for food and drinks and seeing him pretty laid back during a lot of it. This actually goes into a bit of flashback material as Mihari gets called out on her hair being cute and that shows us how the two of them were working together fairly well recently. Aito’s simple and child-like nature is something that comes through regularly and seeing him trying to get closer to her in the way that makes sense to him but is just flat out wrong in so many ways is rather amusing overall. What forces the matter is that pressure from above gets her to work even more close with him by having her stay at his place for three days to get the manuscript done.
She does her best to put a good face on for it but there’s just the natural unease of being around him when he does so many perverted things, often without realizing it. Of course, she’s self conscious about so many things herself so that just makes her mind work it all the worse when there’s nothing actually going on. His innocence, when it does shine through, really does work well. The flow of the story over the whole episode works well since we get to see it play out without being quite so compressed, especially as the big piece of it is just seeing how dedicated Aito is towards completing the project with how far he’ll go. That does, in the end, impress her a lot and it’s pretty inspiring when you get down to it. And that helps to get Mihari on the path she needs to be on to do her job better.
In Summary:
With a class reunion backdrop that goes into some of their back story before Ashisu and the others began arriving in Aito’s life, we get to see more of why Mihari puts up with Aito and his antics. There continues to be the push that Aito just doesn’t get it and that’s reinforced with each action we see with him in general and going back a bit helps to show that it’s gone on for quite some time. He’s still a hard character to get into but you can at least try to understand him a bit, which in itself is something important to do because understanding others is what helps us to all communicate and make breakthroughs. I don’t know that I could survive with an Aito in my life, but seeing the struggles here makes for good humor and fun.
Grade: C+
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Apple TV via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.