While Kusukabe Hikaru and Sajo Rihito are second-year students in high school and in the same class, they’ve never really talked with each other before — not until Kusakabe finds Sajo hiding and secretly practicing a song for class. Kusakabe offers to tutor him until the day of the recital but it seems like these feelings might linger after that.
There is something to be said about romances that don’t engage in an overly long “will they or won’t they” period and cut to the chase. That was something I enjoyed when reading the Kase-san and series. By not dragging things out the series got to be a story about characters in a relationship rather than a story about characters who might get into a relationship. Classmates takes this a bit too fast for even my tastes however: within the first chapter we have Kusakabe planting a kiss on Sajo and it feels like this is all happening before the boys even know each other. Certainly the readers don’t know much about them by this point or have any reason to root for them.
Classmates sometimes tries to portray itself in a languid tone, such as how it attempts to establish the atmosphere around Kusakabe and Sajo before digging into their personal selves. This tone is rather at odds with the pacing, as after the surprisingly quick romantic developments in the first chapter (titled “Summer”), the next chapter (“Autumn”) suggests that the two are walking home together but not doing much else, like they’ve stalled out. The passage of time that Asumiko Nakamura chooses to portray also feels a bit off, because even after this autumn chapter little seems to happen to Kusakabe and Sajo, the story picks up again after they’ve become seniors (ie, springtime) and then jumps to the summer again.
Nakamura also devotes one chapter in-between to the boy’s teacher Haru Manabu, who comes off as a bit of a “predator gay” stereotype since he comments to the reader that you would think that an all-boys school would be a “feast for the eyes” for him even though it’s not (“all that precious youth wasted”) yet we see him engaging in a relationship with Sajo with nary a thought of, “I should not be doing this with my underage student.” Sajo isn’t the most expressive of characters to start with but he comes off even stiffer in these moments too. This isn’t the case of a student chasing a crush but a teacher chasing an unsure student and I was uncomfortable in a way that I don’t think Nakamura intended for me to be.
Even for a story where the characters spend more time in a relationship than dithering about it, a set-up I generally prefer, I found myself just bored because of how little I felt like I understood about Kusakabe and Sajo. This series is still on-going but even with that in mind, I feel like I should have a basic grounding for the main characters after the first volume in a story and yet I just didn’t here. My mind kept wandering to Given (both of these BL series have characters in bands) and thinking about how much more I enjoyed that series since I got to know most of the main cast so quickly. Between that and the odd pacing so far I’m just not very interested in continuing Classmates. I need to have a “relationship” with the characters to care, not just watch them have a relationship with each other.