At first glance it's hard not to look at this manga and see generic shounen ecchi trash. However, it's quietly one of the more romantic manga out there. The basic premise goes like this:
Amano Megumi and Shindou Manabu are childhood friends. Megumi is an athletic, airheaded, semi-gluttonous genki girl whose parents run a bookstore; Manabu is a skinny, brainy, ambitious study maniac whose parents run a diner. They drifted apart in middle school but end up reunited again in high school at a distant prep school for students intending to pursue college/Olympic athletics or elite university academics. Megumi is a nearly undefeatable competitive kendo prodigy; Manabu is a fixture in top group of the class rankings with the old cliche goal to get into Todai, Japan's most prestigious university.
But this only happened because Manabu blew his exam to get into the elite high school he REALLY wanted to go to. His problem is that like a lot of boys his age he's very distracted by ecchi stuff and in his case it screws up his test concentration, and an episode of this on the fateful night before his entrance exam led to him blowing it the next day. To make matters worse, Mikawa, the genius, Yamato Nadeshiko-class girl of his dreams and the only person able to knock him out of the #1 rank back in middle school passed the exam with no problems and went on to academic nerd paradise without him.
So we get to the odd couple setup fairly quickly; Megumi is the lazy genius who can't get motivated for boring things she's not into (these being mostly snacks and kendo) and Manabu is the loyal old friend recruited semi-against-his-will to keep the school's kendo ace from becoming academically ineligible. The semi-against-his-will part is not because he and Megumi had some kind of falling-out or anything; it's because in the three years since they stopped hanging out together all the time she's turned into the sort of outrageously curvy female character constantly ending up in fanservice-y poses you build out a shounen ecchi manga around. As we've already established, that has some negative effects on HIS academic performance. Meanwhile, it's not quite correct that kendo and snacks are Megumi's only major interests either; it's soon pretty obvious that she has 3 major interests, and the last one is her old childhood friend Maa-kun himself.
So it seems like we could have a love triangle, but we don't. Manabu has got NO TIME FOR LOVE, being as determined as he is to reverse his earlier failure and make it into Todai. His crush on Mikawa is a little more emblematic of the type of girl he's in to more than her specifically, and given that Megumi is pretty much the total opposite of Mikawa-type girls she finds herself absolutely friendzoned from the get go. This is a problem for her, because her type of guy is tall, smart, hardworking, a little bit tsun, protective of her when he thinks she isn't looking, indulgent (up to a point) of her free-spiritedness, blah blah and so on until you couldn't be more obviously describing Manabu here. But she instinctively knows if she just up and tries to ask him out, he will shoot her down big time. So instead she plays the long game, basically trying-not-trying to hang around Manabu as much as possible so maybe just maybe he'll come around to thinking he likes the Megumi type he's around often more than the Mikawa type that's just more like a ghost on the horizon.
And really, most of this manga is just Manabu and Megumi doing stuff together (with Megumi's pantsu making regular appearances because that's the pun in the title at work and, you know, this still is a shounen ecchi manga after all). As it turns out she doesn't have to try that hard to be around him a lot because they practically live next to each other and they commute 90 minutes to school both ways. So we have a romance without relationship drama because there's no "official" relationship. Also there aren't any other characters trying to pick up the male or female leads, and the side characters that do pop up (their parents and friends, basically) are all pretty much quietly shipping Megumi+Manabu to various extents. Also this series doesn't exist in a sort of perpetual mid-semester 'whenever'; it has a timeline and continuity. If somebody gets a gift, it stays in their inventory. If Megumi and Manabu have a tiff, not only is it not immediately forgotten but will resurface in later references.
I titled the subject as "Amano Megumi's Quest to Escape the Friendzone" because ultimately behind all the fanservice that is the story afoot here. If it seems a little weird to write SO MUCH WORDSWORDSWORDS about what I ultimately gave an 8/10 manga, all I have to say is that it might not be the best, but it's one of my favorites. It's certainly the one I go to read first every week in Shounen Sunday, and there are no shortage of good titles in Sunday these days. If you're into light ecchi with a heart of gold, you can't go wrong with Amano Megumi.
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