This review contains minor spoilers. Major spoilers will be marked as so.
To summarise, Aharen-san wa Hakarenai is about a high schooler named Raidou and his constant misunderstandings of his quiet classmate Aharen. In each episode, we are greeted with a new situation where Raidou must decipher what Aharen is thinking.
Story
Premise wise, it's a little boring. High school duo of boy and girl, one of them is shy, one of them develops romantic feelings for the other. It doesn't exactly bring anything new to the table. However, this premise is well executed and is used to produce a good paced show with various exciting developments. I really liked the deadpan and randomness humour in this show, the bizarre situations Aharen and Raidou are placed in did give me some good laughs. One of the advantages this show gives itself is not taking itself too seriously, they can just randomly bring the idea "Aharen starts a café inside an igloo" and just run with it.
As I said at the start of the paragraph, the romance was kind of predictable to begin with but as it develops it really develops into good emotional drama. It was a nice change from all the eccentric randomness.
Spoiler, click to view
I also really liked the way the audience was withheld from Raidou's response to Aharen's confession until the last episode, it created some suspense and the way the two actually get together at the end was a nice change from a lot of 12 episode romance slice of life that leave the ending completely open without revealing whether the two characters end up together or not. I've always liked closed endings, and Aharen-san gave me the nice closed ending I was looking for.Characters
The main duo excels. Aharen and Raidou are perfect for this show because they are completely deadpan. The fact that all this craziness is happening and Raidou and Aharen don't seem phased by anything is absolutely hilarious.
Raidou is my favourite character from this show, and might just be one of my favourite narrators in anime. The reason for this is because, despite being completely emotionless on the surface, Raidou's active imagination leads the audience down whatever outlandish conclusion he comes to assessing Aharen's behaviour. Without his narration, Raidou is simply a boring, emotionless guy, but with it he becomes a creative and funny character that the audience can understand, despite his conclusions being completely wrong most of the time. He's likeable too. Established early from the way he tries to be nice to Aharen, the audience becomes endeared to him and wants to hear what he says. I also really like his "isn't this kind of...?" (じゃね) mannerism. It encapsulates how the audience feels about Aharen, never quite sure what she's doing. Raidou becomes relatable through the fact that the information on what is going on is withheld from both Raidou and the audience equally until right near the end of the scene.
Aharen is also a wonderfully written character. She acts as the root of the narrative. She undergoes the most development, and as Raidou begins to understand Aharen, we do too. Aharen-san is ultimately a story of understanding Aharen's character, and we do that as the story progresses.
Spoiler, click to view
Aharen being as deadpan as Raidou, I thought it was wonderful how the romance allowed her at the end to display her smile at the end. We see Aharen gradually opening up to Raidou and eventually her smile.
Aharen's smile marks the end of the story, she's finally able to open up to Raidou and the two get together. It's kind of cliché but it was still a satisfying ending that I enjoyed.The other characters weren't really anything special. Ooshiro underwent some development but it was pretty rushed and overall not completely necessary to the narrative in my view. Toubaru-sensei was funny but her single defining character trait was fainting whenever she saw Aharen and Raidou doing anything so not really much character there. The rest were one dimensional and I really didn't remember a lot about them. Still, this is the story of Aharen and Raidou so the side characters are less important than the two main characters.
Sound and Visuals
Really nothing special again. The animation and soundtrack were fairly standard and I wasn't really wowed by either of them. They fit the show but they were just kind of standard slice of life stuff. Not exceptional, not terrible, just regular. The art style is fairly unique, though so I thought that was positive. OP and ED also fit the show but not the greatest either. Enjoyable enough that I was able to add them both to my playlist but not good enough to be my favourite opening or ending of the season.
Conclusion
Aharen-san wa Hakarenai is a pretty fun anime. If you just want some light-hearted, cheerful slice of life then this is the show for you. With the extremely popular and highly acclaimed Spy x Family and Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai 3 releasing in this season I doubt it will be considered the best anime of Spring 2022, but still a reasonable and funny comedy that entertained me enough to look forward to new episodes. It made me laugh, so maybe you will too?
Did I say Spring 2022? I meant Spring 2017 because this show has fidget spinners.
