Interview with Voice Actors Takehiro Urao & Yūki Yamamoto on the Appeal of Cheerful Sports-Type Heroine Haru ["You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends!" Interview]

——She's a tan-skinned athletic girl and a childhood friend, but what's distinctive is that when they were young, Eiyū and the others thought she was a boy.

Yamamoto: Compared to the other childhood friends, she's a bit special, isn't she?

Urao: Well, they thought she was a (male) best friend.

Yamamoto: While Haru is a girl who will blossom romantically from here on, I think the relationship of being best friends also has value within Haru.

Urao: That's right.

Yamamoto: Since that's what sets her apart from the other heroines, I was conscious of the distance as friends. Especially since Haru doesn't harbor romantic feelings from the start, her physical contact isn't meant romantically but comes from liking someone as a human being, creating that closeness. I was conscious of boldly stepping into his space not just physically, but psychologically as well.

Urao: That distance is incredibly close (lol). That's completely different from the other heroines. To talk about it technically as a performer, during recording, I made sure to do a lot of reactions beyond just lines (like breathing and such). Because she's touching me within the first or second move.

Yamamoto: That's right.

——So because of that physical closeness, there were clearly different reactions compared to when dealing with the other childhood friends.

Urao: My breathing got the most disrupted (lol). Like the part in the club room where (Eiyū and Haru) end up on top of each other.

Yamamoto: Even there, Haru doesn't think anything of it—she thinks it's a normal distance, and that difference is interesting, isn't it?

Urao: Yeah. There's an intensity that's different from the other heroines.

——In the original work, while Haru teases Eiyū, her gestures when she suddenly realizes her own feelings and is startled were memorable. There was also that startled performance in the ASMR "Valentine's Edition" video uploaded to the official YouTube channel.

Yamamoto: It's quite unusual for ASMR to come out before it appears on air, isn't it...?

Everyone: (lol)

Yamamoto: What I thought when I received the ASMR script was that Haru is weak when someone approaches her romantically and aggressively. Even though she seems experienced because she's close with boys, I felt she's a girl who's grown up while retaining a lot of pure, childlike parts, and it was fun to perform.

In the main series too, there's a scene at the end where she becomes slightly aware of her romantic feelings, and I was directed to make it "a bit cuter," so I thought I could have done more with that balance.

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