A very sugary-sweet chapter... The ending kind reduced the sweetness, but it's not enough to entirely offset it.
A shame the flag raised in chapter 24 wasn't like some adult lady scouting out talent like it looked to me. For some reason, the glasses-ponytail-combo screams adult to me. But no, apparently, it was a junior high student looking into a high school to enroll at. Wonder how her role will develop from this not-too-flattering introduction.
As for the death flag comments... what are you talking about? This manga doesn't really have the kinda vibe that we should be expecting a major character death. Or any character death for that matter. Or is something going over my head?
I thought that the death flag tag was present early on in the series, when we were seeing Mashiro entirely through Nagisa's perspective, and it wasn't clear just what was wrong with Mashiro. Or perhaps it was just because the first comment on this thread mentions it? But that would be an insane swerve for the series; one which I couldn't picture it making. The Summer You were There is much clearer about the oncoming death element––even the colors chosen for the early color portions and the covers seem to augur doom. By comparison, this book has been light, bright, and colorful. The swerve would be so violent, not even just on a story level, but on the visual level, too.
I liked the previous arc with Uda; contrasted to Whispering You a Love Song, here I would have been happy to follow Uda's lover story for a while longer. This new challenger does the thing I hate the most in manga, calling people out and challenging them to sh*tty scenarios in which the protagonists have to prove their dedication, or something. Seems an inauspicious entrance into the story––though honestly, if one of these books could make all these challenges zany and hilarious, instead of angst-ridden, I could find the energy to love it. I felt like the Kase-San plot line pulled itself out of a death-spiral at the end, there––but this confrontational beginning often makes it hard to make the story about more than confrontation for its own sake. The Kase-san story, for instance, could have explored Kase's reticence at coming out to her teammates––but that was hardly dealt with. Here in Anemone, I have trouble imagining what the confrontation could lead to, thematically-speaking. Nagisa and Mashiro aren't hiding much of anything from anyone. If the story is about Mashiro's guilt, it did feel like the creator already went there in a previous story. The conflict here could be more specific, is what it boils down to for me. I don't really need all the mystery around the character––if anything, it detracts from anything else the character is introducing for us.
