We’ve all been there.
It’s a school night and you’ve let yourself be tempted to go out for a few drinks with a co-worker or friend after work. Because you can’t actually hold your drink all that well, the one or two beers you drunk are enough to make you blotto and you have to be brought home by someone. So the next morning you wake up on the couch with a terrible hangover, not knowing quite how you got home. As you slowly wake up, you idly look around your apartment and realise you barely remember anything from the previous night. You don’t even remember bringing your student home with you, let alone why you tied her up.
Slow Start episode 7 was …interesting. In a season with quite a few outstanding slice of moe series, Slow Start was looking a bit lost, a perfectly competent adaptation of yet another Manga Time Kirara series but offering nothing not seen before. Apart perhaps from slightly more overt yuri content. Throughout the series so far the girl tied up above has been shown to be very affectionate with another one of the main cast, her childhood friend who had barely grown since she last saw her in elementary school. Eiko herself meanwhile being one of those cool beauties that has a girlfriend in every class. All of which is as expected until this episode, when she was the focus character for once and it turned out she was heavily into their home room teacher, the poor woman who woke up to find Eiko tied up in her living room.
Earlier in the episode Eiko is celebrating her birthday in class, with all her classmates having given her hair pins. When the teacher shows up, Kiyose teases Eiko a bit about her many many hair pins before putting one in herself: a paperclip. As Eiko and the rest of the main cast discuss all this, she lets it slip that Kiyose is her type exactly: cold and a bit overbearing. She certaintly likes to flirt with her, as the episode shows, with Kiyose not exactly playing along or encouraging her, but still having a natural rapport with Eiko. In the safe world of a slice of moe yuri baiting series all this is very cute.
Nevertheless I’m not sure I’d be onboard if the series does anything more with it. There was a strange seriousness to this episode, almost as if it was intended to be romantic rather than comedy, an erotic undercurrent (what with the needless tying up of Eiko) out of place in a series like this. There’s nothing wrong with Eiko having a crush on her teacher, or trying to flirt with her and test her boundaries that way, but the show as a whole seems to root for her and that’s a bit iffy. Student/teacher romances are always a no-no no matter if it’s yuri or not: too much of an age and power difference to be healthy. Which is a pity because the flirting between these two is really nice. Eiko is light hearted and teasing, Kiyose has an innate ability to just say or do exactly the right thing to melt Eiko in a puddle of embarassement. I could cheer them on if only they weren’t student and teacher. Luckily even when drunk Kiyose still remembers Eiko is her student; she does nothing to encourage her. I like Slow Start, so I hope it’ll be back to normal next week and the flirting just becomes a running gag again rather than the way too intense forbidden love it wanted to be this episode.
