Hey! Do you remember that “bunny-girl show” from a few years back?

Yeah, that one. It’s based on a light novel series whose final main story installment saw print late last year in Japan, the English translation of which is due early next year. Last night I picked up the penultimate volume… and this morning I discovered that a continuation animated series (following from the first animated series and subsequent movie releases) aired over the course of this past summer.

(I’m annoyed that, as a fan of this property since the start of the first anime series, I didn’t even know the continuation series existed. Bad fan, no biscuit. I could’ve been watching the show all season long! Ah, well. Now I have something to catch up on.)

The story is close to wrapping up, and reading the “…Girlfriend” installment (volume 14) makes me wonder how well the author is going to “stick the landing.”

The last few volumes, once the Kaede (Sakuta’s little sister) arc concludes, focus on two things: The kids entering their college years (thus approaching the end of adolescence), and the mystery surrounding a singer named Touko Kirishima. What’s interesting is that it’s kind of a slice-of-life thing for the most part. “Here’s what those weirdos are getting up to now that they’re not high-school kids anymore” is a significant part of the setting. There’s plot going on, and more “Adolescence Syndrome” pseudo-scientific weirdness, but it’s taking place while the characters are just trying to live fulfilling lives, figuring out what they’re going to do with their impending/newfound adulthood. Sakuta may have to deal with whatever weird thing is driving the plot in any given installment, but he also has to work his tutoring gig and his restaurant job and do valuable upkeep on his relationship with Mai. Life doesn’t stop happening just because there’s a mystery to resolve. The stakes are at once laser-focused on the personal level and profoundly existential on a broader level.

The whole series wrestles with issues of life, death, destiny, self-identity, and so forth. It’s kind of in a pop-psych way, of course, but given it’s a story about schoolkids… well, they’re not tenured psychology professors, are they? The vaguely-scientific mechanisms behind the weird occurrences are similarly based on a kind of pop-sci understanding of quantum physics and other high-end scientific principles… but they get the story where it needs to go, so I tend to think of it all as the kids making the best sense of this weird stuff as they can based on knowledge appropriate to their level.

You just gotta roll with it, is what I’m saying.

So, with fourteen out of fifteen light novel volumes down and one to go, how are things looking? It’s a bit difficult to determine. Sakuta’s role in things has always been as a kind of Sherlock Holmes But For Emotional Problems. The people around him (and, arguably, he himself) have various trauma that manifests as extremely weird stuff happening in reality. He doesn’t solve them through science, he figures out the emotional situation and then talks the affected person out of whatever headspace led to the weird stuff manifesting. Afterward, things usually go back to some kind of normal… keeping in mind that some causality-based shenanigans can linger. It all accumulates in a weird way, and which version of what character is able to remember what part of which timeline serves as a signpost as for how bad things have become this time.

The “Touko Kirishima” mystery includes, if I may hint at spoilers, what could be considered a case of “what if there was an anti-Sakuta out there causing Adolescence Syndrome weirdness instead of resolving it?” Which sounds cheap and cheesy when I phrase it like that, but it’s not like the author’s given him some kind of evil nemesis. It’s just… one more person carrying baggage, and this person is self-aware and has chosen to make that everyone else’s problem.

It’s Sakuta’s job to figure out, one more time, how to get through to someone on an emotional level so that reality can return to a state as close to “ideal” as possible… while wrestling with the question of whether it’s even fair for him to be the one making that call to begin with. Wouldn’t certain people be happier with the new state of things? Probably. But Sakuta’s a “rascal,” and he’s selfish enough that he wants his version of Mai. Everything else is secondary… but only secondary, not further down the priority tree. Because this “rascal” shows though his actions, over and over, that he really can’t help but help.

The 14th volume, Rascal Does Not Dream Of His Girlfriend, is a bit slimmer than the rest and includes (oddly) zero illustrations. Honestly, I get the feeling that 14 and 15 were meant to be one installment but it got too unwieldy and was chopped in two. So… I eagerly await the last one, due early in 2026. I want to see how this all resolves.