My Senpai is Annoying 01
Senpai ga Uzai Kōhai no Hanashi 01
先輩がうざい後輩の話 Episode 01

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

The short, young salesgirl IGARASHI Futaba starts her morning and heads to the office. Once there, she talks to her boss. Futaba gets startled by the voice of her tall, work senpai, TAKEDA Harumi. The two head out to make some sales calls, where Futaba is annoyed that Takeda is walking slow for her sake. For lunch, Futaba insists her senpai choose a place rather than go somewhere she likes. So they go to a burger place, where Takeda orders her the kid set since it has a plushy she wants.

Takeda has Futaba make a sales presentation to their next client and it is successful. On the train back to the office, fellow co-worker Kazama takes a photo of Futaba sleeping on Takeda and sends it to the office. The next day, Futaba’s boss reveals she made a mistake, so she and Takeda go and apologize to the client. That evening, Takeda buys Futaba her favorite drink. Later, coworkers Kazama (male) and Sakurai (female) take Futaba to an arcade to cheer her up.

That night, Futaba returns to the office to get her train pass and discovers Takeda sleeping at his desk. He had corrected her mistake. Sometime later, the pair make a new presentation to the client and they love the improvements. Afterward, Futaba and Takeda go get something to eat. Futaba gets drunk and ends up admitting that rather than Takeda see her as an ideal daughter, she’d like him to see her as a potential wife.

Thoughts/Review:

I’ve been following the  My Senpai is Annoying manga on Twitter for quite some time. And then when Seven Seas licensed the manga, I bought it. (I’m way behind on reading/reviewing though.) As such, when My Senpai is Annoying 01 dropped, I felt I needed to give it a watch.

Very Loosely Based on the Manga

Normally, when it comes to anime adaptations of a source manga, I want it to be a faithful adaptation. However, the source My Senpai is Annoying manga is generally made of 4-page chapters and rarely are the chapters related except when Sensei wants to tell some kind of longer story. There’s no plot to speak of, except maybe the romantic plots of three couples who are not in a romantic relationship.

Further, things in general are more generic in the source manga. For example, in all of the manga I’ve read to date, the company that Futuba and Takeda work at isn’t specified as to what they do. And Futaba and Takeda aren’t called salespeople. When they are out and about, it is because of lunch, not sales calls. In the manga, Futaba is struggling with an assignment that Takeda helps her with. In the anime, that was changed to some purchase order Futaba jacked up.

Still, considering the lack of any plot in the source manga, it doesn’t bother me that the anime adaptation decided to give things more structure by taking the tiny bits they took from the manga, then massively expanding them and even changing the gag of them to continue a narrative. The elements My Senpai is Annoying 01 pulled from the manga were used nicely to come up with a little story rather than random events.

The Romantic Angle

Because of the radical changes My Senpai is Annoying 01 made to the source material, I was afraid that they’d scrap the romance stuff in the first episode. After all, in the manga, it is very early on when the drunk Futaba lets it slip out that she’d like Takeda to see her as wife material.

Thankfully, my worries were for naught. The way the writers laid out the story, putting Futaba’s slip-up at the end of the episode worked. And I suspect they’ll possibly pick up on this in the next episode.

It will be interesting to see how the anime handles the other two romance elements from the source manga.

FUNimation

I have to admit, I honestly expected FUNimation to destroy the subtitles for My Senpai is Annoying 01. Yes, they were using “Senpai” in the title, but I attributed that more to Seven Seas doing it. However, not only did FUNimation keep all of the Japanese honorifics in the streaming subtitles, they even used the term “kouhai”, which really surprised me.

Further, I didn’t sense anything dreadfully wrong in the adaptation. It didn’t feel like some “localization” where someone is attempting to be hip. I appreciate that. As such, I will give FUNimation credit were credit is due.

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

In the end, My Senpai is Annoying 01 was OK. I had no problem with the anime not being a faithful adaptation due to the nature of the source manga. However, at this point, the random peeks into the lives of Futaba, Takeda, and the others in the manga are still better to me.