Hello fellow anilisters!

Today I’m going to be writing something actually timely, giving my nerd ramble thoughts on this past season’s recently concluded Sasaki and Miyano. Sasaki and Miyano was probably the sleeper hit of the last season for me - something I didn’t expect to like quite as much as I did, and didn’t expect to think about as much as I ended up thinking about! This is hopefully the first of two reviews on things I loved from this past season, with a review on Akebi’s Sailor Uniform hopefully coming soon™ too.

So… what is Sasaki and Miyano? I’d like to describe it at a basic level by comparing it to the 2018 yuri anime Bloom into You, one of my favourite romances in its own right, and a show with much common DNA to Sasaki and Miyano. Both shows are, at their core, stories of a sort of mental odyssey of queer self-exploration shown through the eyes of a protagonist unsure of their sexuality. This journey is spurred by being drawn into a sort-of-but-actually-not-relationship-more-than-friends-ish-sort-of-thing with a close friend who is also gay and also themselves very new to both romance and queer feelings, but knows themselves enough to confidently declare their love for the protagonist and pursue a relationship with them. The marketing of both shows gives you the distinct impression throughout that these are feelings that, after a lot of intense pondering, the protagonist will eventually come to realise they reciprocate. Both are similar in their initial deceptiveness, marketed as queer romances yet find their romance secondary, or at least on level pegging, with the protagonist’s mental coming of age journey of self-discovery - they are shows that are as much serious character studies as a photobook of cute couple moments. Both shows unflinchingly gaze into the emotional dislocation, isolation, stress and interpersonal impacts that can be experienced whilst navigating sexuality, and properly capturing both the void in which many of us folks feel when trying to realign and make sense of the most fundamental constitutional elements of our personhood, and how hard that can feel, balancing that drowning feeling with the joy at the end of the tunnel, finding some clarity, answers, and a more comfortable truth to live. Much of Bloom into You’s greatest strengths are also similar to Sasaki and Miyano’s: the protagonist steals the show with some of the best-written monologues and deeply considered ‘internal worlds’ in anime; the music is an absolute joy, a perfect fit to the watching experience; it’s writing is defined by its curiosity, its passion in building characters indistinguishable from actual humans, and subsequently building its show around the pacing of how its real person characters would naturally grow, as opposed to forcing the growth of its characters into a cleaner pre-existing mould of a show (an argument I probably worded more elegantly in my review of Honey and Clover, another show I think excelled at doing exactly this).

To lead into the review proper, I wanted to address a couple of mental red herrings I ran into when I first started the show. First, I think the first episode was surprisingly poor (mostly from a technical perspective). To put it bluntly, I thought the storyboarding was shit, and the animation was the poorest the show ever gets. As such I feared this show would be a bit like a show I dropped a few years ago, My Roommate is A Cat - a story I was totally emotionally attached to and ‘sold on’, but found difficult to watch thanks to the abundant rough edges to its presentation. And whilst I do think the animation of the rest of Sasaki and Miyano is very average, it never looks janky to me in the way some shots in the first episode do. The storyboarding and cinematography never bugged me at all outside of the first episode, and certainly not to the degree that it made the show feel to me like its pacing (at a micro, inner-scene scale) was lopsided, jagged and wobbly (thoughts I had a couple times during episode 1).

I was also very, very wrong about the content of the story. From the first episode, my initial hunch was that the show would 'just' be wholesome happy gay fluff. And I don’t mean that demeaningly- I don’t look down on shows that don’t really ask you to think too much to enjoy them. I love my weekly nibbles of soft, cloudy slice of life candyfloss joy as much as I enjoy my brain-teasing mysteries, plotty and dense political dramas, and meticulously world-built fantasies and sci-fis. What I’m trying to say is that I expected it to be something I’d watch over my lunch each week, say ‘aww’ a couple times, and then probably forget about promptly. Something I’d give like a 6, wouldn’t think too much about in the rest of my life, bish bash bosh, done. I didn’t think it would be at all ambitious to be anything deeper than that, and I didn’t think I’d find myself ever personally reflecting on the material it presents. I didn’t think it would be such a curious show: in how probing its lines of questioning to its characters are, how intent to lay bare thought processes and the delicate, slow blooming of feelings it is, or for it to be so interested in mining real unique individual depths to Miyano or Sasaki’s personalities, with a stubborn insistence on treating its protagonists as if they were real life people who behave as such. As I watched further and further, I was repeatedly impressed with how deceptively intricate and deeply contemplative of a story Sasaki and Miyano really is - contrary to my totally wrong initial impressions, it’s one of the most ably written, thought-provoking romance anime I’ve seen (and I’m saying that in the middle of a Kare Kano rewatch, that’s big praise!)

In the rest of this review I’m going to delve further into the qualities that really give this show its personality and its shimmer. What is it interested in as a work? What makes it function, what makes it tick? What did I get out of it as an experience? What aspects work, what doesn’t?

For Sasaki and Miyano most of these special qualities I find laden in its fantastic script, in its awesome writing. And I think what makes said writing tick, primarily, is how it writes emotion. This is particularly so in all the feelings wrapped inside Miyano's processing of his sexuality. How reflexively it’s all constructed is what really impresses me - Miyano sees himself behaving in a way, and then inquires as to why he behaved in a certain way, and keeps on pulling that thread and thinking about the shape of a feeling that prompted an action, and theorises and contextualises that, and eventually synthesises that into a new understanding of himself. It’s a lot about doing things to feel the things he thinks they might evoke, and a lot about how we process feelings through certain frames of thought or theories, and how being confronted with different frames of thought can lead to shock recontextualisations of ourselves. It’s a lot of gritty feeling and thinking about feeling and feeling a new feeling by thinking about the feeling you’re feeling - which is a layer of thought rarely invested into characters in any medium of art. There’s a real dialogue between competing theories in Miyano’s mind, and logicking and reasoning his way forwards at all times, with the weight of increasing evidence eventually bouldering down old assumptions he can no longer defend, and working his way round the long way to conclusions by cancelling out alternative explanations. Miyano’s thought processes are waaaaay more detailed than I was expecting, really breathing life into his character. He’s really one of the jewels in the show’s crown.

I love how it's one of the most caring romances I've ever seen. At some point in the middle of the show I realised just the extent to which every action one of the two leads make is defined in careful consideration of what the other might want, their boundaries, and how best to prioritise the other's feelings and wellbeing even over their own. How much Miyano cares for Sasaki truly bleeds through thanks to how detailed his internal monologues are, in the detail in which his thought processes are given light. I was touched by how he entertains all these thoughts about his sexuality and about Sasaki because he wants to treat the feelings of the senpai he so deeply respects and finds joy in spending his free time with with a profound tenderness and aversion to hurting him, inadvertently or otherwise - primarily through his repeated fear of ‘rushing an answer’ and ‘getting it wrong’, in his repeated requests for Sasaki to ‘please wait a little longer’. Care is also woven into the fabric of Sasaki’s own love for Miyano, and how it too turns emotional space into the realm of the palpable and physical in a way that’s really hard to articulate in fiction. It’s visible in Sasaki’s constant battle with his own boundaries - wanting to convey his overwhelming feelings of love and affection for the boy he’s madly crushing on, but it is utterly incensed with preventing himself from being ‘too pushy’. He doesn’t want Miyano, the physically smaller and younger guy there taking a much longer time than himself to think about it all, to feel intimidated, forced into a position of discomfort, or at all ‘pressured’ into reciprocating, and so, throughout the show, keeps a balancing act of swinging emotional distances and false faces of calm. Both Miyano and Sasaki prioritise the feelings and comfort of the other, in effect, above their own - both’s lives feel genuinely upended by the feelings they feel for the other, and the relationship they share, in profound ways.

I love the way it recognises the extent to which feelings can be so knotty, seeming impossible to process and parse. Sometimes categorising and then dealing with a feeling doesn’t happen at the click of your fingers, instead requiring active thought and uncomfortable introspection to solve. Sasaki and Miyano’s internal monologuing really does justice to how exhausting and challenging it can be to make sense of your feelings towards someone, and how that can all tangle so tightly into issues as foundational as your self-image and sexuality. Having that layer of that deep, scary self-exploration (on both ends, but particularly Miyano's) before Miyano and Sasaki realise quite the shape of their feelings for oneanother just makes it feel so honest. It also drives home how feeling is a state of being - feelings are something you live, and something the show thrives in is its painstaking attention to detail in sculpting the texture and colour of these feelings and then dousing its characters in them, making us as an audience feel how the lead characters feel overwhelmed by them.

And I love how the texture of its love, as outlined partly above feels fittingly teenage. It’s a love disoriented in hormone-laden confrontation with unfamiliar thoughts and feelings that dwarf and consume their minds, and in the way they live their lives in its orbit. It articulates in a way that the best character studies do how emotions can feel torrential. This is only enhanced by the outstanding way in which the show handles its character development structurally- in which change comes in emotional avalanches and revelations when you least expect them, rather than as predictably paced epic climax plot moments you can feel characters have been hammered into in order to neatly fit an episode structure. Little here, too, is clean and 'movie-like' - it's messy as fuck, stumbling over words, unable to find the right expression, and that human clumsiness is what gives it character, showing both the masks everyone wears in public and the actual person underneath, in organically natural slips. It’s suitably awkward and suitably overwhelming, representing honestly what a first love would feel like for 15 year old kids. And Sasaki and Miyano feels just as genuinely queer as it feels genuinely teenage, genuinely wrestling with queerness and how it tilts and reshapes our basic life experiences. It’s not a romance indistinguishable from a straight one if you took the faces and names away, like I’ve found a few other queer animanga can be (sometimes out of utopian wish fulfillment for a society not shaped by cisheteronormativity, and sometimes out of a basic desire for total levity, but either way missing a shade of the truth).

Most of the above I think gives the sense that it’s all serious, stroke your chin sorta stuff, and that’s not wholly accurate! On the other side of the coin it’s incredibly cutesy, filled with adorable little daily moments and conversations on the morning train they catch together, weaving through the hallways, shoe racks, and side stairs around their school. The more slice of life-y side to the show ably captures the development of their relationship, embodying how their mundane daily lives start to curl closer to one another, and how the thought of the other slowly becomes all-encompassing and utterly central to both of their lives. I think the likability and depth of both partners to the relationship makes it really work in its more light, humorous, and relaxing moods as well as its more contemplative ones. It’s mostly quite a fun, relaxing, watch-over-a-cup-of-tea sort of show. I think the moods balance out quite well - it never feels overly depressing or heavy, and never feels that its moments of levity defuse or betray the emotional weight demanded by Miyano’s internal thought spirals.

The final thing I think is really praiseworthy about the show is its music. On occasion it can be gorgeous! There are a couple of stunning oboe-led orchestral pieces here, totally preying on my musical weakness - Liz and the Blue Bird, Bloom into You and Violet Evergarden hit me different to the point that oboe solos make me cry on command, a bit like one of Pavlov’s dogs but with tears instead of drool. There’s some lovely lone piano-led tracks here too. The OST as a whole is light and breezy when it needs to be, and all swelling and emotional-like when it needs to be too - the music always perfectly accompanies the moment. As for its theme songs, the OP and ED aren’t mind-blowingly good but I liked them both. They're similarly breezy, soft and catchy in just the way the show wants them to be.

There are a couple of dimensions in which I thought the show is mediocre - in addition to the relatively subpar production values I outlined earlier, there’s also my disinterest in many of its side characters and the way I felt it took a few episodes to really get going and start to hit.

Though I liked some of its side characters, about half of them came across as too dull and one-note for me, and most of the time in scenes with them I felt I’d rather be spending time with the titular couple. The side characters really are kept as side characters there for comic relief, and I didn’t really find the relative lack of attention they garner much of an issue (it wasn’t trying to centralise them, and didn’t need to - the titular characters hard carry the show anyways). I didn’t really care for Hanzawa much aside from his occasionally profound little words of wisdom to Miyano, and I didn’t care so much for the episode mostly focusing on him and his backstory. I also don’t really care for Sasaki’s classmate with the blue fringe and his BL-obsessed girlfriend he’s always arguing with, but I liked Miyano’s deadpan friend who’s always talking about his girlfriend (he made me giggle). The squeaky-voice blonde fella with the fringe made me laugh a few times too.

By the end of episode 2, my impression that it would be a compelling tale hamstrung by a dysfunctional production had been dispelled. Yet it was only really by the middle of the series that it really clicked how much I was enjoying it, and that I was really appreciating its writing. I think the series shows it’s true strengths - the elaborate mining of Miyano’s thoughts, and the care, love and detail in which Miyano and Sasaki’s closening relationship is rendered - once the two actually start to get genuinely close and the prospect of a relationship starts to come onto the cards. It’s certainly fine up until that point, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who dropped it early for assuming the show is less than it turns out to be.

Sasaki and Miyano is a bubbly, lighthearted slice of life about the daily rhythms of two guys coming to terms with their feelings for oneanother, only made richer by its elaborate underside- a sometimes intense, deeply personal self-exploration of queerness. If it sounds like it’s up your alley, please give the show a shot!

And, as always, thank you so much for reading my review!