This had been on my to-watch list for a while, but when the dubbed version hit Netflix, it moved to the top. This was such a fun series! You start off with Chiyo, acting like a typical character with a crush, trying to confess her feelings by saying “I’m a fan”…..which gets her an autograph.

Turns out the stoic, tough-looking high school boy is a manga artist. It’s not really a secret, he says, it’s just that nobody believed that the same person who writes and draws beautiful, delicate, emotional stories for girls is…this guy.

Chiyo starts acting as Nozaki’s assistant as an excuse to get closer to him, and learns that several other classmates help out as well. And those classmates are as weird as Nozaki.

This is where the fun of the story comes in. It could be an excruciating ride through Chiyo’s days, unable to confess her crush to Nozaki in words he won’t misunderstand, but instead you’ve got, for example, his other friend and assistant, who is so flirtatiously suave on accident that he embarrasses himself, and serves as the inspiration for Nozaki’s female heroine.

My favorite characters were Hori (drama club president, Nozaki’s background-drawing assistant in exchange for Nozaki writing scripts the drama club can use) and Kashima (the school’s “prince” whom all girls crush on, and leading actor in drama club productions). Both characters were fun by themselves, but their relationship was hilarious, as Kashima is very aware of her princely reputation and makes no effort to dissuade her fans even when it takes her away from the club, and Hori is determined to hunt down his lead actor and make her work.

The two main characters have quirks of their own. It’s a running joke that Nozaki is oblivious to Chiyo’s crush–though not all her feelings day to day–but Chiyo has her own blind spots, for example, not figuring out why her brash and oblivious friend Yuzuki Seo seems to offend so many people?

There’s no real endgame, which adds to its charm because while the episodes do build on previous ones–new characters introduced, character revelations, etc.–there’s no huge climax that it’s working towards, probably at least in part because the manga is still ongoing. Instead, each episode deals with a specific event–drama club needs to find an actor, Nozaki’s manga-drawing neighbor wants to talk about story ideas, Chiyo attends an art club meeting–and humorous shenanigans ensue because every single character is a dork of a different kind.

Verdict

English dub? Yes, and I enjoyed all their voices! They all sounded to me like very American voices, not trying to copy the Japanese voices, but rather trying to show the characters’ personalities in more-natural-to-American-ears tones. (Several are very close to their Japanese voices–they’re not drastically changed, but none of them sounded obviously like they were trying to match a Japanese voice, we didn’t get any that were really high-pitched, or oddly smooth-and-low.)

Visuals: Oh, this is a pretty series. Beautiful colors, nice lines, I just loved staring at it.

Worth watching? Yesssss. It’s so fun! It’s so fun!