"How do people want to see me?" Highschool is a wonderful time filled with adolescent and youthful energy but also uncertainties regarding our own future and times like this is where puberty is at its peak. It’s no surprise that we begin to ask ourselves this sort of question.

KareKano isn’t your typical romance. It explores love as concept from different perspective through different cast and how each developed their feelings from one another. This is most notable with the main couple of the series Miyazawa and Arima who struggles regarding their own identity. Miyazawa who put on a façade due to the desire to be pleased by others and Arima who put on a façade due to his desire to live up his family reputations and as they started dating, little by little they started to discover their true selves and self-worth through themselves and others. The anime explores their relationship in a very mature way, I like how Miyazawa has a good amount of self-awareness regarding her own feelings and emotions for Arima and while it can be difficult to convey those feelings to one another, in the end they handled with care for each other I guess you could say that communication is key.

There are some other episode that explores love from different perspective. Tsubasa’s arc with how she comes to terms with her dad’s remarriage and to be able to accept his partner’s circumstances to become a family as a whole and the single episode that focuses on Miyazawa parents, from how they first met, how they fell in love to how they become parents. Those episodes were a nice change of pace from Miyazawa’s and gives its viewers and how everybody have their own experience with love.

Now let’s talk about the production. Well if you already know me, im a huge Hideaki Anno fan and it’s no surprise that he went hard with the production. Amazing coloring that gives a nice feel to each scene, the use of limited animations, creative decisions, manga like paneling, use of real life shots and still shots and it works surprisingly well with the story’s tone that also doesn’t feel jarring when there’s a shift when it comes to its tone from over the top comedy that keeps you on your toes to its serious moments. It also comes that Hideaki Anno has a good understanding of the characters and every scene he does emphasize so much with how they’re feeling from the feeling of loneliness, doubt of the characters regarding their identity to the more cheerful scenes like one my favorite scenes, when Arima thought that Miyazawa had a crush on him and he started laughing under the blooming cherry blossom symbolizing that he has fallen in love for the first time, it’s a poetic and well executed scene from the man himself. Overall production is the cherry on top and what makes the KareKano anime so fresh and fun.

The only flaws that I could nitpick is how the episodes went a bit downhill after 18 due to Gainax’s circumstances (lol) at that time but it didn’t ruined my enjoyment and feelings for the series overall.

Overall there are many things that I could learn from this anime: To acknowledge your here and now as in your true self, to cherish the time you spent in your youth doing all sort of things, falling in love, make new friends and just get out there. But the biggest lesson to me is to try to understand each other knowing their circumstances, how important communication is for a healthy and strong relationship, and to be kind to others because "Because love is something that spreads".