Watching this anime reminded me of Bocchi The Rock, we thought it was about cute girls doing music related stuff but in fact it's a case study on the struggles of social anxiety and how Bocchi overcomes it. This anime is similar, if not the same to that.
Episode 1 was a very rough start, the main character, Kyoutarou Ichikawa is introduced as a cringy, edgy and unsociable person. He's not good at expressing himself so he'd do doings overboard in not a normal way so people around him thinks he's weird and naturally avoids him. Ichikawa has a goal though, that is to kill the prettiest girl in his class, Anna Yamada. But by some stroke of luck they ended up bumping into each other more often than chance would allow and that's how the seed for romance was planted.
It's a pretty basic plot, mc meets girl and girls meets mc, bam boom bam he falls over her and she screams "pervert!" but secretly enjoys it. Except it's not. Contrary to romance and harem animes I've watched, Ichikawa is different from other romance anime main characters. He's honest, he's rational and most importantly, he doesn't chicken out even though he lacks self confidence. Meaning when push comes to shove he will stand his ground. At first I thought Ichikawa was a loser and with the power of character development and being the main character he'd magically become sociable and get a girlfriend but nope. He was a great person from the start but because of the facade he put up people tend to think lowly of him. In this aspect, the anime does a good job at slowly revealing that Ichikawa is improving his life little by little by gaining more self confidence and putting off his facade. Stuff like the choices of clothing, the types of books he reads, the way he talks, his word choices etc. Stuff that don't appear in the center of the screen and is treated as irrelevant by the viewers, the anime takes advantage of this and slowly reveals that Ichikawa has changed a lot since episode 1. This is writing at it's finest, or maybe the credits should go to the animators. Also, it doesn't just focus on Ichikawa, Yamada, the main heroine also gets character development too. She's portrayed as a mature girl but there's more to her than meets the eye apparently
The writing aside, the animation was godly and it stayed consistent throughout the whole season. The music was great too... I think? I didn't notice it much because I was too busy paying attention to the small details lol
Overall a great show, episode 1 will for sure put a lot of people off on the anime because of the cringe vibes Ichikawa gives off at the start but trust me it's worth the watch
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