High School as an Endless Trope Machine: His Favorite

Makimura, Yoshida, Sato, Akimoto

Many manga series revolve around high school students or just-graduated seniors entering college. Think the range of John Hughes to Heathers, then throw in Buffy and, to really confuse the genres, high schools where people sing. The setting and human developmental period supply an endless round of tropes that run the gamut from serious to comic to dark.

Lots and lots of material.

When I first started reading His Favorite, I assumed it was standard teen romantic fare, a mix between Only the Ring Finger Knows and Dengeki Daisy.

In truth, it is an outrageous though gentle spoof of trope after trope after trope (at least as of Volume 6). Consequently, it is quite insightful about how high schools and high schoolers operate.

One of the smartest elements, for instance, is that when Sato isn't being pursued by demanding girls, he hangs out with Yoshida and Yoshida's friends.

Yoshida belongs to a hard-to-define-but-totally-definitive group, namely the kids who hang around the convenient store in Say Anything. Yoshida & Company aren't slackers, though, and they aren't  smokers and they aren't (always) the AV crowd although there is some overlap. They aren't the art crowd either (that "crowd"--a competitive brother and sister--is spoofed in the series). They're basically the kids who skateboard and play hacky-sack but in His Favorite, they are less likely to draw attention to themselves in those overt ways.

Sato and Yoshida, bored at Makimura's latest crush.

Two of them are girl-crazy. Starry-eyed Makimura is constantly chasing after the latest supposedly perfect girl; earnest Akimoto is a big guy who has a female friend whom he has known all his life and with whom he is totally in love. However--other than a very funny scene where they and Yoshida go on a blind date with some truly scary girls--they tend not to actually date. After all, Yoshida has Sato.

And Yoshida is the de facto leader of the group--without realizing it. He is the most level-headed, the most likely to recognize the moral implications of a decision. And the most likely to call out behavior that crosses a line. (Sato is as capable of this but cares less.) Yoshida is Lister from Red Dwarf and Leonard from Big Bang Theory, guys around whom a group naturally forms without them forcing their leadership on anyone (high school libertarianism).

Sato aligns himself with Yoshida and therefore, with this group. And here is where psychology comes into play. Sato could hang out with the honor students. Or the jocks (sort of--it is unclear whether Sato even likes sports, but everybody assumes he does). However, the faintly nihilistic side of Sato (mentioned in previous posts) keeps him from taking the one-upmanship of high school seriously. Besides, Yoshida's is the group he always gravitated towards, even when he was a fat kid in elementary school (hence the psychology).

And the group fits his needs. Yoshida's group gives Sato the outsider status he naturally inhabits. At the same time, Yoshida's group is so devoted to ordinary, everyday life that Sato is prevented from becoming an intellectual poseur.

In the end, he just wants to hang out with Yoshida on a rainy day. This is the group that lets him do that.