Hanabi's nervous energy about her first crush captures that specific 12-year-old panic where everything feels catastrophic and miraculous at the same time. The show treats her worries as genuinely important without ever winking at the audience or leaning into anything gross, it's a romance that remembers what it actually felt like to be that age. Each episode is small and quiet, which means you're watching someone discover who she is through the smallest moments, the way real crushes actually work.

Sixth-grader Hanabi Ayase is twelve, caught between being a child and being an adult. She accidentally sees her homeroom teacher kissing, and she frets that her body might start changing before her friends' bodies do. Her boy classmates' mischief has given her a low opinion of boys, but that starts to shift when a class assignment pairs her with gentle Takao Yuuto, and the two end up sharing a first kiss on the school rooftop. Watching her best friend find romance, Aoi Yui wants the same for herself. She falls for hot-headed Kazuma Hiyama after he shields her from a rejected suitor who had been talking about her behind her back. The romance follows these four through this stage of growing up, capturing the innocence and thrill of first love.