If there were a time for the romantic drama to be played so straight it would seem like a parody of itself, it makes sense that the actors would be twelve-year-old kids, too honest, straightforward, and way out of their leagues with romance to really complicate things. As grueling as it is to watch a full twelve episodes of two rather flavorless love stories, it's a weird sort of catharsis to see potential love triangles fall apart in mere seconds because the existing couple can't betray their love for one another, or watching the boyfriend and girlfriend tiptoe around what they truly want to say when we know that they’ll just come out and say it in the next few minutes. 12-sai certainly nailed down the essence of being twelve: no one knows what the hell is going on. Which can unfortunately be about as much fun to watch in an anime as it was to watch in middle school.
12-sai chose to feature not one couple, but a pair of couples, presumably for the sake of showing off multiple kinds of personalities and to set them up side by side. The first pair is between the composed and confident Takao and the childish cheerful Hanabi, following their idyllic and straightforward relationship which suffers from few if any communication problems or awkwardness, mostly thanks to Takao always saying the perfect thing at any given time. The second pair is between Hiyama, who speaks and acts masculine but turns out to be rather shy in a relationship, and the mature tomboy Aoi. Their relationship is much more awkward at times, with plenty of stammering and not speaking their minds, but the show is careful to remind us in the end that they’re only like this because of how much they love one another, to the point where it seems odd the awkwardness of their conversations doesn't fade over time.
Since the camera tends to follow the female characters, with occasional internal narration by Hanabi, we also tend to see these diametrically opposed relationships in stark contrast to the relative maturities of the two girlfriends. Hanabi, who has always relied on Aoi for support given her childish nature and Aoi’s assertiveness, now ends up inadvertently serving as Aoi’s relationship role model, even if it has much more to do with Takao being a twenty-year-old Casanova written into the body of a twelve-year-old boy. The two hang around the classroom asking for advice from the class “love expert,” planning dates and buying gifts, and interpreting (or misinterpreting) the signs their boyfriends give off. Thankfully there is also an episode revolving around their actual friendship outside their ability to double date, although clearly it was added as an afterthought to forge some character backstory and context besides the central relationships.
After the opening two episodes set the two couples up, the rest of the show is the occasional peek into their daily lives. Or such is the case if daily life exclusively revolves around having a significant other, which is completely plausible for a group of impressionable preteens with bad social standards to live up to. The class dynamics that they deal with are actually interesting, albeit overly dramatized; the boys in the class harass the girls with random nonsensical facts about girls they probably misheard from the thirteen-year-olds, and of course give Hanabi crap for being passive and pure, while the girls tend to bully each other more subtly using group dynamics and manipulation as revenge for moving in on each others’ crushes. While this gender split is spelled out in plain letters, 12-sai does actually address common forms of bullying and social pressure found in Japanese middle school, although the depiction is more comedic and farcical than the real thing.
The more ridiculous and memorable part is near the center, where Hanabi ends up in a love triangle with Tsutsumi, a pushy boy from her elementary school class who transferred back in. He actually could be a dead ringer for Hiyama in terms of personality, so perhaps one goal here was to show what would happen if Hanabi went with Aoi’s boyfriend instead of Takao. But where Takao and Hiyama share a positive friendship in tandem with their girlfriends being best friends, Takao and Tsutsumi start butting heads and dealing with their feelings for Hanabi in macho ways like racing and showing off. Here's where 12-sai shows off the more annoying subtext running throughout the show, namely that the girls are constantly working to please the boys, who are basically in control of the relationships and ensure that things run smoothly. If they were going to choose Hanabi and Aoi to narrate, it seems odd that they would pick them to be the passive parties, but no one could accuse the studios of not knowing who they’re marketing towards.
After the Tsutsumi love triangle fades without much incident he disappears into the background, and we resume the humdrum life of twelve-year-olds in love. In fact, everything passes without much incident. They check off all the boxes of social things couples do, from double dates to fireworks to cheering each other on at sports festivals, and yet after sharing an initial kiss we see them struggling to even get through the basics of relationship intimacy. They work towards holding hands, work towards using each other’s first names, and so on. While Hanabi and Takao are always a step ahead and cross these boundaries without too much struggle, there still is a barrier hanging over their heads, keeping them from going past a baseline level of both emotional and physical closeness to one another. And I guess that’s fair, and maybe the problem isn’t their maturity or emotional preparation, but rather just their knowledge and awareness of what being a couple actually is. How could they know? They’re only twelve.