WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Teasing Master Takagi-san Season 3, Episode 12, "March 14th," now streaming on HIDIVE.
Picking up immediately on its penultimate episode, Season 3 of Teasing Master Takagi-san finishes on a strong note with a special White Day story. Although anime often makes mention of the day meant to reciprocate on Valentine's Day gifts, it's rare to actually see any screen time depicting it.
True to form, Takagi-san takes the opportunity to reflect on Takagi and Nishikata's relationship while promising much more to come, closing the season with the pair's most romantic moment to date.
Season 3's final episode opens with a reminder of Hamaguchi's challenge to Nishikata to confess his love to Takagi on White Day. Although it's revealed that Hamaguchi put forth the challenge out of his own anxiety surrounding his confession to Houjou, Nishikata seems to take his dare to heart. While walking home with Takagi shortly after, Nishikata begins to seriously contemplate the nature of his feelings toward her for the first time.
Eventually, Nishikata avoids making a decision by throwing himself into a project, which he deems his greatest showdown with Takagi to date. Crafting an intricate riddle-solving scavenger hunt, which he dubs "Nishikata Quest," Nishikata plans to divert attention from an actual confession by giving Takagi her White Day gift either as a prize or as consolation at the conclusion of the puzzle gauntlet.
Unfortunately, Takagi is unable to make it to school on White Day, much to both her and Nishikata's disappointment. She had initially been planning to arrive part-way through the day after attending a relative's wedding, but when a storm causes a delay in her return, she misses the day entirely. While this leads to an endearing side story where the trio of Mina, Sanae and Yukari accidentally stumble upon Nishikata Quest, Nishikata himself is left dejected that he is unable to spend the special day with Takagi.
Things hit a twist when Kimura visits Nishikata later in the day while the latter is on library duty. After returning a book titled Bryan, which Takagi had used to tease Nishikata with a fake declaration of love, Nishikata discovers that the book contains no such confession scene. Through a series of rapid flashbacks, he realizes what the audience has known from the start -- Takagi has always been genuine in her flirtations, both in that particular instance and every other time that she used romantic inferences to embarrass him.
In the midst of putting things together, Nishikata receives a text from Takagi stating that she will be returning that afternoon. In true romantic comedy fashion, Nishikata runs to meet her at the docks, clad in the scarf that she gave him for Christmas, only to miss her by a few moments. Refusing to give up, he begins to pursue the car that she's in on foot. Despite falling on his face multiple times, Nishikata manages to keep up until Takagi notices him from afar in a serendipitous moment, at which point she pauses her ride to meet up with him.
The scene itself is reminiscent of the dream that Takagi had in the first episode of the season, with Nishikata making a heartfelt profession to her amidst a grove of cherry blossoms in full bloom. Even though he is unable to commit to actually saying that he has a crush on her, Nishikata tells Takagi that he wanted to see her on this particular day so that he could give her her gift on time. Takagi, shrewd as ever, is able to read between the lines, accepting the present and the underlying feelings behind it.
The ending of Season 3 is a truly heartwarming one. It seems to imply that even though neither of them has verbally said it, Nishikata and Takagi are aware that they both have romantic feelings for the other. Although the teasing is sure to continue, there is little room for misconstruing advances from either side of the dynamic now. By bringing the season full circle with the fulfillment of Takagi's premonition, the show has essentially confirmed that the two are meant to be together.
Nevertheless, as thrilling a conclusion as it is, it's still a resolution that exists primarily in subtext. The duo may interact very differently from here on, but they are still not technically dating. However, aside from the typical tendency that romance anime have to keep moments like these on the down-low, there may be a more intentional reason for this ambiguous ending.
While the episode marks the end of Season 3, the Teasing Master Takagi-san movie is set to come out on June 10 in Japan. The most recent trailers show that the film will take place in a summer setting, following directly on the heels of the spring backdrop and seasonal progression of the TV anime's conclusion. As the original manga is still ongoing, it's difficult to say exactly where the two will end up in terms of canonizing their relationship.
However, just as Season 3 pushed the envelope with completely new content, as well as re-contextualized scenes from the manga, the movie could take the pair in a direction that the source material never touched on. If this is the case, the finale for Season 3 may be just the push that Nishikata and Takagi need to take the plunge in the movie as a bona fide couple.
