It’s the final volume of Anne Happy, and while you aren’t treated to too many answers, you are treated to some science lessons. Want to know about the arctic owl? Well, you’re in luck. Want to finally get to the bottom of Ruri’s issues? Keep waiting forever.
The Happiness Class goes on a field trip to the zoo, and Anne is thrilled. She even stayed up late creating her own informational guide. Even if Anne can’t become a zookeeper, she certainly has a future designing the animal information sections for the zoo. Her friends start to get into the spirit, but they’re also concerned about how many things could go wrong: Hibiki getting lost, Botan collapsing, Anne…just being Anne. Just when it seems like the day is going well, Anne disappears, leaving everyone to search for her.
Later, Ruri looks forward to her parents and her younger sibling coming to visit over the winter holidays. But when they cancel the trip, she tries to accept it and, to borrow lyrics from a famous song, “be the good girl you always have to be”. But while it should be just another holiday alone, Ruri finds the news hitting her hard. Botan had her family issues in the previous volume thanks to her sister testing Ruri and Anne, but the sisters have a nice heart-to-heart in the opening chapter of volume 10.
So the main thing point of this volume is to have the girls learn to accept themselves, flaws and all. In other words, turn their misfortune into fortune. But two of the main girls don’t need to learn this lesson. Hibiki is always boasting and prideful, and Anne doesn’t register how bad her luck is. But in Anne’s case, the zoo episode shows that while it may not be the safest career choice for her, her heart is dedicated to animals. Between this volume and the previous, we see Botan and Ren have their friends; Tsubaki has made progress thanks to Anne’s and Kodaira’s encouragement but still has Timothy to rely on.
So that leaves Ruri. Ruri doesn’t have the worst problem or even the oddest. But unlike most of her friends, her affection for the construction sign guy is something she developed and not born with. Readers can gather that it was tied to her absent parents, but anything beyond that has been mostly a mystery. And, unfortunately, it remains a mystery. We learn a bit about her family and why she’s living alone, but I felt like Cotoji teased us with her story only to give a very abridged version.
In fact, all of volume 10 runs at a pretty casual pace. Except for Kodaira’s scientific explanations, it doesn’t have that weight or big moment to make you realize this is the end and we’ll likely never see these girls again. It’s more like an anime teasing a potential second season. Ruri’s relationship with her parents and her crush aside, there are other parts which could have been explored. It’s hinted that one of the girls has a crush on her friend, but the object of her affection is mostly oblivious. Even with Kodaira’s past, which I expected to be really interesting since she seemed to have some sort of military background, is reduced to all telling, not showing.
That’s the problem here — volume 10 doesn’t show. It has had this problem before, and it rears its ugly head once again. The manga ends at the start of the new school year, so not only do we never know if the girls became well-adjusted adults, it skips scenes like the friends banding together to raise money. That would have been a better use of its time than how the end of the last volume and the beginning of this one show Botan’s sister and how much they care for each other. I mean, it’s good for her that she’s moving forward, but Ruri needed a moment like this with her own parents instead of an off-screen phone call.
Volume 10 would have been lackluster as a normal volume, but as Anne Happy‘s finale, it was very lame. How unfortunate for these likable but unfortunate girls, particularly Ruri.