When we see a romcom a lot of time we ask to ourselves “when are these two going to get together?”, so we have here one of those not-so-normal series where the couple is already stablished from the first episode and we don’t have to ask “will they or won’t they?” because they already will. So that’s what Kawaii dake ja nai Shikimori-san is about, a boy named Izumi and a girl named Shikimori that are boyfriends and we follow them while they spend time together both with their friends and as a couple, so don’t expect an actually deep plot.

Izumi and Shikimori‘s relationship is more on the side where the girl is the one with the dominant dynamic on this one, since Izumi is pretty clumsy and gets in a lot of problems for his bad luck Shikimori is there to protect him and helping him, they care for each other and she doesn’t hit him because she got embarrassed by him or something if you worry about those stuff. Despite being said that have been dating for a year they seem to have started dating like a week ago, they still blush a lot to each other and they don’t even kiss, I have friends that turned into couple that have kissed more in a day than these two across the whole anime. However, despite their relationship not seeming as advanced as they say it is, they still have their cute moments specially when they aren’t just “she’s so cute” or blushing an giggling, like I really liked the scene when they were talking on phone in the night, on the festival was also nice, and when Izumi gifted Shikimori that necklace, and the date of the last episode were actually cute couple moments, so they relationship isn’t all that bad nor basic but it is still lacking in some areas.

About their friends, they at the start seem pretty dull, across the episodes we get to see more of them fleshing out their characters a little even is still quite basic, Inuzuka is actually a good friend and not some of the other friends in animes that want the MC dead for being with a girl. Nekozaki is a pretty active and extroverted. Hachimitsu seems like dead inside (just look at her eyes), but it is understandable and she is actually pretty funny with her one-liners. I think the best part about them was the episode in the sports festival of the school, the interactions of that episode between all of them come across much better than before and you actually see them being more friends than the dull stuff they were doing at the beginning.

I actually think the most interesting side character was Kamiya due to adding a little something for a while to the series in her arc, even though she is cool and distant towards everyone, she isn’t actually that reserved and her inner self is something that Izumi noticed so that’s why she feels stuff for him, however she knows that she can’t be with him because he already has a girlfriend, the stuff between her and Shikimori about Izumi got resolved so nicely, there wasn’t some kind of discussion or some kind of drama that kept going for episodes, they solved it right there after talking for a while, and despite still not being over Izumi she understands and tries to get over it, sad that we saw so little of her.

I think there is a little problem with the comedy, most of the time it isn’t funny, let’s see a lot of the time this will come down to Izumi’s bad luck which aside from being repetitive (it is character’s quirk after all) it also comes down too slowly, every joke made with this is extremely predictable from the floors to the football game, the punchline just comes too slow to be funny, good thing by latter episodes this got reduced to much less scenes and while till not funny it was much more bearable, but as I said above the bright side of the comedy is mostly relied on Izumi and Shikimori’s friends.

The art is pretty colorful and bright, the animation while not top tier still looks good. The opening song is pretty nice, some parts of the video may not fit with the series like at the video where the start of the chorus is, the series of events may be more metaphorical or something than actually showing something that you’ll going to see, however the opening video still looks very good and the song is definitely a very good one, and with how vibrant it is makes me wish that the rest of the series was even close to it. The ending song while the song itself not that special the video is something that I love to watch, it’s almost like a videogame and seems like something like I would play.

So Kawaii dake ja Nai Shikimori-san is definitely not a series that will make you go crazy, but if you want to see two people already in a couple instead of waiting for like 2-3 seasons for they to get together and if you also want a relationship in which the most dominant is the girl then you can have some nice time with this series. As for me, I want the series featured in the opening.

Thank you for reading.