Why in the everliving FUCK do people like this show? I just don't fucking get it. I L.O.V.E. this genre. Anyone who knows me will immediately tell you that when it comes to anime I'm the biggest fucking sap ever. It doesn't take me much to get invested in a romantic story, and even less so to get me to feel heavy emotional pangs and sympathize with the characters. More than one anime romance drama has left me in tears, but this show has me crying for completely different reasons.
This show started off fine. A dumb weak sci-fi premise where the future versions of all the characters send back letters so their earlier selves can avoid their regrets. Seems like a weak idea for a show if the characters never fuck up or create any drama, but whatever, I can roll with it. I'm a sucker for romance after all. There's this new kid in town, Kakeru, who is the express subject of nearly all of these letters. Turns out that he's sad as fuck because of some bad life stuff, and ends up offing himself because all of the core cast are just bad friends and didn't really support, or some shit like that.
Of course, our special needs MC, Naho, likes this guy, but is too cripplingly disabled to say it, like all portrayals of high school girls in anime. Normally, this wouldn't be an issue, and we'd spend 13 episodes of high school bullshit getting them sort-of together and end on a half-assed, half kiss like every other shoujo ever, but now we have to save Kakeru's life. It's alright though, we'll just use the magic future letters to make sure we don't fuck up... UNTIL WE IMMEDIATELY START IGNORING THEM ON EPISODE. FUCKING. ONE. Naho is more dense than a fucking neutron star and decides to throw the magic letters that are ALWAYS RIGHT out the fucking window because she "just can't handle it".
I get why she doesn't from a story perspective; this show would have no drama at all if they just followed their future selves' instructions, but that isn't good for us as an audience. If we know what the two possible outcomes are, we just don't care, because a show like this reads from the first episode that everything is going to be OK despite a couple bumps in the road. Orange just can't fucking decide if it wants to be some sort of "we choose our own destiny" bullshit or just a normal high school shoujo romance, and it suffers heavily because of it.
From an aesthetic perspective, this show leaves everything to be desired. The shoujo fat-lipped art style is incredibly generic and the animation is the farthest thing from fluid I've seen in a long time. This isn't even counting the numerous 'QUALITY' moments that line the series middle section. The consistency takes a hard drop off a cliff at episode 3 (which is also where the anime jumps the shark from the manga, BTW), and doesn't even remotely pick up again until episode 10. Literally half drawn frames are there for you to see plain as day. Music is also incredibly generic. Everything about this show is generic. And bad.
Burn this show in the dumpster fire it deserves to be left in. There are hundreds of mediocre anime romances and a handful of great ones that you could be watching instead. Avoid this like the plague.
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