A while ago (has it really been that long?) I talked about 12-sai. as a showcase of young misguided confused boring love, but for a minute let's pretend that its particular brand of romance is a primary school thing. Moving forward to middle school it doesn't get much better, a special brand of absurdity born from hormones and the birth of social strata, and worst of all it's the age where anime romance starts to show up en masse. And the portrayal doesn't seem to change much when we reach high school; anime high school couples have all the drama of real-life middle school couples, plus plots that justify taking themselves far too seriously (not that we weren't there once). Then a weird thing happens: college anime like Nodame Cantabile and Genshiken almost always come back down to earth with their approach, with more casual comical dialogue and an acceptance that romance is just that, exciting but hardly earth-shattering.
As a work that features no less than ten different burgeoning couples, many of whom breach the confession stage right from the outset, Tsuredure Children inherits more of its romance from the latter, even if the high school setting and mainstream otaku appeal demand that they play it more awkwardly than their college counterparts. Jumping back and forth between the different pairs, we see all kinds of dynamics, from the best friends who practically started dating without realizing it to the shy girl taking the initiative with her straightforward boyfriend, to the delinquent girl being bullied by the student council president and the stupidly slick-talking dork who appears whenever a girl is in need of advice. All of them are awkward in their own way, but all paths lead to romance and understanding eventually, and with two minutes tops per couple per episode there isn't much time for them to take themselves seriously, rather than just pulling a couple punchy gags that develop their situations just a little bit more.
Most of the characters are ones we've seen before, but it's nice to have the mix-and-match of couplings, and again with so little time it doesn't matter that most of them stay on the level of tropes. The exception to me is one of the central pairings, the best friends Chiaki and Kana. Their romance starts off much further than the rest, even though they didn't actually know they were dating; they play off each other in a way that only incredibly close partners could (or maybe a bit further, but such is comedy). Their issue is overcoming the physical barriers in relationships, possibly because they've known each other for so long, and at some point Chiaki pulls the very college-like move of having a small drink of liquid courage, just to catalyze a situation they're both already looking for. But what comes out is a legitimate moral debate, and a strain on their friendship based on a misunderstanding of what it means for Kana to want a more physical relationship with Chiaki. And all the while the gags they pull with each other keep it the funniest bit in the show.
It would make sense that the show would live and die by dialogue, beyond being a 4-koma adaptation with half-length episodes only, and Tsuredure Children surprised me more than anything else this season in terms of the strength of the dialogue. The fans of the manga had seen it coming already of course, but I was just as happy being surprised, going in expecting a more drawn-out intercutting of romance stories like Hatsukoi Limited shoehorned into twelve minute slices only to find they fit in plenty more romances without running out of comedic steam. Still recognizable as anime romance, there's probably a degree of Stockholm Syndrome at play, and it's still firmly aimed at people who know the tropes backwards and forwards. But for that crowd it's definitely a hit, simple and straightforward, and staying fun right to the end without wearing out its welcome.