Aharen-san wa Hakarenai is quite a strange anime that's hard to place in a genre. Drama? It's not very dramatic. In fact it's about as far from dramatic as can be. Slice-of-life? Perhaps, but most of what's happening on screen is so stupid it bears little resemblance to anything that can conceivably happen in everyday life. I see some sources have it down as "comedy" but I think that must be some sort of mistake as there's hardly any jokes in the show. Most of the time it just lumbers along lethargically while the main character Raido provides monotonous, droning commentary about what's going on - which, for the most part, is nothing.
What is Aharen-san wa Hakarenai about? Well, it starts off with a boy-meets-girl template set in highschool. The girl in question, Aharen, suffers from the triple threat conditions of Age Stunted Syndrome, Emotionally Challenged Syndrome and Facial Paralysis Syndrome. While these are common afflictions for anime characters, for some reason no anime ever comments on them
The typical Aharen-san wa Hakarenai episode comprises a series of sketches, the majority of which are extremely formulaic and come in a three-parter like this
This look almost like an archetypal joke format, which is perhaps why people have tagged this as comedy, but with an actual joke you'd expect a punchline to be delivered in act 3 and most of the time here there is none. It's like seeing a street with rows of scaffolds on either side but hardly any actual buildings within the scaffolds. Very strange indeed. Did the writers forget to write the jokes? Was this generated by an AI?! I don't know. I guess it'll just have to go down as one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time (cue Raido-esq exaggerated speculation imageries involving pyramids, aliens, illuminati symbols etc).
To be fair to Aharen-san wa Hakarenai, funny moments do exist, though sparse they may be. Occasionally the anime turns its usual narrative formula on its head which provides a rare moment of surprise; the sketches relating to a bunch of local kids can also be quite cute and good for a chuckle or two; also the shipping teacher makes an amusing first appearance but she turned out to be a one-trick pony and the same punchline was practically copy and pasted into all her scenes.
The show also sometimes reaches for emotional poignancy, but it took a long time for me to scrape together enough of a fuck to give. That said, I did eventually warm to a few of the characters, and some of the relationship dynamics shifts unexpectedly quickly towards the end, which made things mildly interesting.
If that sounds like I'm damning the show with faint praise, then, well, that sounds about right. The writing is not witty enough; the stories are not varied enough; the visual gags are not good enough to be funny. Almost the best thing I can say for Aharen-san wa Hakarenai is that I didn't end up hating the characters. Though considering the titular character's half-her-age appearance and clingy, helpless mannerisms are designed to pander hard to the moe crowd, that in itself can probably count as an achievement.
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