Although I enjoy my share of high school rom-coms, I'll admit that I was a bit wary of this one going in. While you can't always tell much about a series based on its title, light novels often tend to be exactly what they say on their overly long tins, and manga adaptations of those novels can sometimes be even more of a mixed bag with how they're arranged. As such, I was a little worried that something with “second prettiest” in its title would come off as judgmental or mean-spirited. This first volume isn't perfect, but it laid the foundation for a more thoughtful story than I would have expected.

The story centers around a first-year high school student named Maki who has trouble socializing and seemingly ruins his chance to make friends when he outs himself as a film nerd who's into B-movies. That changes when he happens to run into his classmate Umi at the movie store, and she happens to be into the same kind of movies he is. She also reveals that she's been looking for an excuse to become friends with him ever since she found out they have similar tastes, but since Maki is worried about how this new friendship will affect both of their social standings, he agrees to start hanging out with her on the condition that they keep it a secret from the rest of the school.

While I expected that premise to serve as a set-up for a romantic comedy, a lot of this first volume is instead dedicated to exploring the contrasting ways in which the two of them navigate through social circles. Umi is the kind of person who is good at going with the flow and knowing how to avoid getting into conflicts with other people, but this has also led to her always putting on a mask when hanging in big groups, and finding herself constantly subjected to people's opinions of her based purely on her social standing. Even her status as the so-called second prettiest girl in her class is due to how often the boys compare her to her more popular friend, Yuu, and she finds herself being constantly approached by them simply because she's seen as the more “attainable” of the two. With all that social pressure in her life, it's not hard to see why she'd seek out a friend that she can let her guard down around, and you can understand why she'd be willing to put up with Maki's desire to keep their friendship hidden if she can maintain it.

Inversely, Maki is someone who struggles to function in a group and has had trouble fitting in due to how often his parents have moved around. This has caused him to be constantly worried about what others think of him, and thus seeks to avoid standing out as much as possible. While Maki is the less interesting of the two, he does still feel a realistic depiction of someone with those kinds of social hangups, and the story does enough with these anxieties to make him feel like an actual teenager rather than a blank slate. We see a lot of this through his interactions with Yuu, who is a lot more naturally friendly than either of our leads, and thus tends to make Maki uncomfortable whenever the two bump into each other, or she tries inviting him to hang out with her friend group. It would be easy for the series to frame these interactions as simply a matter of Maki needing to be more sociable, but it is also considerate to the fact that some people just aren't good with being in large groups, and doesn't completely disregard Maki's perspective on that, while still making it clear that he has a lot of room to grow as a person. These encounters eventually lead Yuu to decide that she wants to get to know Maki better so they can become friends. I'm interested in seeing how a friendship between them develops when Yuu is his polar opposite.

That brings me around to my one big critique of the story so far, which ironically, is the actual friendship between Maki and Umi. Although this first volume does a decent enough of explaining why these two would be drawn to each other, it goes from having them agree to the friendship to immediately seeing them casually hang out, and given how socially averse Maki is, I think it would have benefited from seeing him get used to Umi's presence in his life (although the end of the volume does include an excerpt from the light novels that details the first time Maki invites Umi to his house, so this might be a flaw of the manga adaptation rather than the source material). Given that their friendship is built on the initial basis of shared interests, I would have also liked to see a few moments of them actually bonding over B-movies rather than just leaving that as the set-up, though that's more of a nitpick than anything else. My biggest issue is that while Maki is portrayed as insecure enough to make you understand why he'd be so desperate to hide his friendship with Umi from their classmates, it doesn't make him doing so any less frustrating, and makes it feel like he doesn't value their friendship quite as much as she does. Thankfully, this is a problem that he is very much aware of, so I'm inclined to believe that it will be addressed in later volumes. However, for what we have right now, it's hard to feel invested in seeing them become closer.

Beyond those complaints, I otherwise found the series to be pretty inoffensive. The artwork is solid, if not particularly remarkable, and the translation by Sarah Burch does a good job of making these characters sound like actual teenagers without feeling like it's trying too hard to sound modern. If you're in the mood for a relatively chill high school drama, what's been presented here so far has enough going for it to make for an easy read. That said, there is the potential for a stronger story if this continues to lean into the looks at social expectations that this first volume presents. While I think there's more it needs to do to build up the relationship of its leads, it's planted enough seeds that I think it could get there.