What happens when you decide with your friends you want to skip school because you’re not in the mood? What happens when you decide to call your sister the absolute worst? What happens when you see a Japanese giant hornet latch onto someone else’s sister out on the street? And what happens when you lament not being able to get a girlfriend while still in high school?
The Daily Lives of High School Boys chooses to answer these questions and more responsibly in its final volume!
Of course, responsibly is fairly relative. What you think is a responsible way of solving the questions may not line up with what these characters think is responsible. For example, I believe attempting to come up with an excuse to skip school (a lot of the options involves Tadakuni in every bad way possible) isn’t very responsible…until one of the excuses they use ends up immediately happening. And as for not being able to get a girlfriend, can you believe this question leads into Hidenori discovering he likely knew these two and another person called Silvapithecus?
So yes, this last volume ends exactly as you’d think it would. There are no resolutions of any sort. No looking into the future for any of these characters. Just jokes and stacking piles of books on top of Ringo’s snoozing head. Wait, did I say that was all the student council did to Ringo who slept through all of their sabotages? Well in any case, any other series lacking a resolution would be a major detriment. For The Daily Lives of High School Boys? Perfectly ok!
Well, I did have some hopes though. I was hoping for whatever reason Hidenori and Literature Girl (Yassan) would finally get to know each other aside from saying awkward one-liners, but the following instead occurred:
- Hidenori being chased by Literature Girl after both being at the movies and eventually this ends with him taking an accidental knee to the head by Literature Girl after he slips on a random banana peel.
- Hidenori sitting by the riverbank hoping to meet with Literature Girl and hope to say his cringe-worthy line one last time, only for some dude to take her place. (Those two bond immediately, as Literature Girl watches from afar in anguish.)
- Hidenori AGAIN sitting by the riverbank hoping to meet with Literature Girl only for one of the High School Girls are Bizarre girls (Yanagin) to take her place. (Yanagin doesn’t respond to him saying his line until the fourth time! He ends up attempting to run away, only to run into…you guessed it, Literature Girl.)
Well, in some other timeline they’ll either get together or hate each other’s guts. It’s just not this timeline.
Otherwise, it’s hard to say what this volume did wrong. We got plenty of jokes (Hidenori lying to his friends about Emi being his girlfriend leads to him immediately trying to take it back, but the boys already take it as fact and not a surprise), plenty of decidedly illogical things (how does one man cause a blackboard to fall down when he tries to clean it??? Also never hand Tadakuni a bucket full of floor wax!), and we manage to learn Habara really is something else (through that punch machine game and when she “saves” Toshiyuki.) There was even a school festival chapter that attempts to resolve Literature Girl and Hidenori’s long-standing non-existent relationship.
It’s just, you know, hard to do when Hidenori’s supposed to be a ghost and you still believe it’s him anyways…
The Daily Lives of High School Boys was a worry since it took a while for a publisher to license it. Would any of its jokes still land after all this time? Aside from volume 2, the answer is a yes. If you did watch the anime, there’s a high likelihood you’ll definitely enjoy reading the manga. Now it’s time to say goodbye to these dorks, and maybe not imagine how their college life is going…