Adachi to Shimamura – 07+08 [Please Choose the Best Chocolate for Me | The Briar that Weaves the Past: Old Rose]

Seems like Adashima has settled into a ‘festivities groove’ of sorts. Christmas, followed by New Year’s and then Valentine’s Day. These are the days which are becoming the highlights for our cast of adorkable schoolgirls.

And as a has-been schoolgirl myself, I can’t help but relate to that feeling.

Because, if you ask me, high school is overrated.

It’s not the dramatic joyride where hormone-fueled teenagers get drunk every other weekend or a life-changing experience that makes you discover your true inner self. At least, that’s what I’ve observed to be the case for most people. Though, if you did experience something along those lines, then well… noice! Good for you. But as for the rest of us boring souls, high school is honestly kind of uneventful. I mean, sure there are moments you relive in reminiscences and days you look back on fondly but all the other times, nothing much happens. You go to class, hang out with you friends, talk to them about how you spent your yesterdays, and considering that you are in your mid-teens and probably live with your parents, you spent it doing not much. Yet still, you talk about mundane daily events like they mean the world to you. Though in a way, they kind of do. After all, this is your world.

We don’t usually realize it but most of our days are spent leading up to other days. In anticipation. The excitement of what’s to come. And festive holidays play a huge part in that. Be it shopping for Christmas presents or stocking a heart attack inducing amount of candy for Halloween or just counting down the days to the end of a hellish year (Yes, almost there. Only 31 more to go!).

So, when I see our lovable band of high school girls in Adashima, just saunter through their days and cherish the moments they get to spend together, I feel comforted. That this is normal. That I didn’t miss out on anything. That the glory years of our adolescence might have been uneventful but they were in no way ordinary.

Episode 7 is the epitome of this kind of relaxed, slice-of-life storytelling. The premise of this whole episode can basically be summed up by its title itself – ‘Adachi tries to make the best kind of Chocolate for Shimamura’. That’s it. Yet it turns out to be the most enjoyable episode of the series yet. I have mentioned before how this series is so difficult to write about. And it’s episodes like this which make it so. How can I put into words character interactions and their reactions? How can I write about the atmosphere, the warmth of the world Adashima creates where every character just adds to the comfy and the wholesome nature of this series? I can’t possibly do that without doing this series offers a disservice. So, you know what, I’m not gonna do that at all. Let’s talk about the next episode instead.

Episode 8 provides with us with a colloquial dash from the past when Shimamura runs into her childhood friend, Tarumi, with whom she was equally as close as Adachi, maybe even more so and who went away unannounced, leaving her behind. Their encounter is far from how dramatic it was poised to be. No flashbacks of painful memories and people falling apart in a puddle of shrieks and tears. This lack of over-dramatization is what makes their reunion feels so much more authentic because turns out that people who see each other after years apart don’t actually throw a hysterical fit in public. While Adachi gives up on her culinary abilities and gets into horoscopes. The rest of the episode involves her trying to get Shimamura’s attention and look away awkwardly when she gets it. Again, not the kind of events that lend themselves to extensive breakdowns.

The episode ends with Shimamura meeting Tarumi instead of looking for chocolates for Adachi and I can imagine that our lovestruck romantically confused MC would be heartbroken to find that out next week.