Today I read the second volume of Gal no Jitensha wo Naoshitara Natsukareta, which we talked about just a few days ago in this post. I was ultra excited about reading more of it as the first volume had great characters and a charming story, but this volume left me a bit confused about it, to be honest.

The story continues from where we left off, with the two characters now free to interact at school after they revealed to everyone that they were childhood friends. We get a few cute scenes and various situations involving Seika, her gal friends, and the protagonist.

Seika is still as great as always, trying her best to close the distance with the protagonist while internally panicking, thinking "Did I go too far?" whenever something happens. She also realizes some of her thoughts resemble the yandere girlfriend trope and is a bit taken aback by herself.

Seika herself has some past trouble aside from the hospitalization. The relationship between her parents turned sour due to different opinions on how to better cure her or what school she should attend. She feels responsible even if, as a child, she really had nothing to do with it.

The protagonist even pushes Seika to host a makeup course for everyone to join, and it turned out to be a success. Honestly, all these scenes were really entertaining. However, things eventually lead to the bad parts when, while going out with Seika and Chika, they meet two middle school classmates of the protagonist by coincidence.

That is when he ends up revealing the whole thing to Seika, and... his past trauma, which was hinted at in the previous volume, turned out to be quite less severe than I expected. It made me go "Ehm..." when they started to act as if it was the end of the world. Remember, he ended up changing schools to avoid the group after this event.

Basically, the protagonist was building items back then and gifted them to some friends while also taking a big share of the culture festival preparations on himself (they kind of threw the work on him). During this period, he visited an anonymous message board linked to the school and found a few comments about some students selling the items he made and gifted to them, while also making small talk about using him to do stuff.

That's... it.

Disgusting? Sure. But to the point of closing down completely on all relationships, changing schools, and having a trauma over it? Hardly. I am not sure if the author actually knows how bullying really goes or if maybe he wanted to make it lighter for the series.

Either way, it created a disconnect because you have the characters acting all serious over it, but you just can't feel it. The protagonist even went AWOL for a few hours, making everyone (and Seika) worry that he was involved in some incident or something else serious.

I guess they closed the arc now, as Seika reminded him that nobody is strong and he should rely more on people around him. But again, maybe I am out of touch due to being much older than the characters of the story, but really dude? Like... really?

Now the series seems to be moving toward closure. At the end of the volume, the protagonist asks Seika out on the day of the Fireworks Festival to answer her declaration of love. Will the author close the story with them going out, or is it going to go forward a bit longer? We'll see soon, I guess.