Kimi ni Todoke is a pure slice-of-life anime where it follows the main protagonist, Kuronuma Sawako, in her high school years. She has been constantly ostracized due to how she looks and the eerie aura she gives, causing a lot of misunderstood rumours about her and people avoiding her at all cost. The series also focused on her blooming relationships with her friends, classmates, and her crush, Kazehaya Shouta.

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The anime did a great job of showing how loneliness could affect people. My heart truly goes out to Sawako as her life in high school before Kazehaya intervened was very similar to what I experienced. On the surface, we may seem okay as we are constantly putting on a brave front, but when people are not looking, we break down from loneliness, just like Sawako did in the first episode.

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However, people like Kazehaya is unfortunately rare in the real world. I think this anime serves as a good reminder to people that we should be more kind to one another.

With that being said, let's move on to the story. To be honest, it is similar to another anime, Horimiya, but this has a much more realistic view of life and relationships. Things do not fall into place overnight and the anime did a good job in showing how things take time to build or mend. Just like how Kurumi was trying to sabotage Sawako, it took her some time to build up the tension and deliver the final blow. While it does not seem so since there are time skips in place, it actually took days, or weeks even, to reach to the point where Kurumi showed her real self in front of Sawako.

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Another thing that the anime did a good job in is how realistic some of the characters are in terms of their personalities. Take for example, Kurumi was shown to be quite manipulative and got others to do her bidding. She put up a front where she pretended to be a sweet and caring friend. Normally, other anime would portray her as "that is simply how she is due to her being a beautiful, spoiled and rich girl". But in Kimi ni Todoke, they painted her in a more realistic way as the person who was also "bullied" in middle school turned "bully" in high school.

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Although the anime did a great job in all of those factors I mentioned above, it still does not garnered a high score from me. The only reason is because there were moments that were too... boring, I would say. Horimiya is more successful, in my opinion, than Kimi ni Todoke is due to the series throwing out comedy after comedy as it runs. While it does touched on sensitive topics like loneliness, bullying, and possible depression, it is more of a "touch-and-go" basis. However, in Kimi ni Todoke, they focused on a lot on every aspect of the characters' life.

For example, after Chizu learned about the hard truth about her crush, they spend quite some time on her being depressed, having a fight with Ryu, and finally letting out all of her emotions in front of Ayane and Sawako. While those are definitely important moments to understand the story, it could feel like a "drag" to even go through them.

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Overall, the anime is actually quite a good overview of the concept of life and relationships, but it could be quite boring at certain points. To keep myself engaged, I was actually doing other things while watching this anime.