"No otaku worth their salt would ever shame someone for the things they love"

This quote, which i'm probably mangling together from a handful of different translations due to poor memory, is one of my favorite quotes of all time by now. It's source, as you should know, comes from episode one of the show that you'll see me ramble about, and the topic of this review; 2.5 Dimentional Seduction.

The story, as you'd figure from that quote, is one about otaku. it's about people who are passionate about things they love and engage with those things with their entire heart and soul, unapologetically so. However, by virtue of being a story about otaku, it also addresses the main problem that anyone willing to assign that label to themselves has to bear: being judged for the things you like.
This is more notable in the manga, which features some of the more otaku-centric arcs within the whole story, but you can also see it within this adaptation in the characters of Kisaki-sensei, Nagomi, and particularly Nonoa.

To many of us in the english-speaking side of things, the term 'otaku' mostly just refers to those who watch anime and read manga. If you are a bit more informed about the otaku culture of japan however, you probably know that the term extends far outside the realms of anime and manga. The term, while often being self-assigned by otaku themselves, can be taken to be a pejorative term, mostly equivalent to calling someone "obsessed". Being an Otaku, of any kind, is to devote yourself to something to a point most people would deem unreasonable. You will only ever be obsessed with something to this degree if you love it, and 2.5 Dimensional Seduction is a story about expressing this love, and enjoying it as much as humanly possible.

There is a weakness to this enjoyment, however. One which you probably know just as much as I do. When you love something that much, and when you try to share that love with the world, you will get mocked by those that don't understand it.
That mockery, that shame, has driven many of us to hide the things we love. After all, It's only natural that you'd rather shut up than be laughed at. And so you shut up. You stop bringing up your hobbies for fear of ridicule. you stop expressing your love because it makes you vulnerable.

Thus, "No otaku worth their salt would ever shame someone for the things they love" becomes my mantra, because the last thing i want is to deprive someone of a chance to express their love. It does not matter what things you like, whether they are good or bad, whether I myself like them, or whether you watch it for the intriguing story or the sexy anime women. What matters to me is the sparkles in people's eyes when they talk about the things they enjoy most, and that's all that should matter to them too. Thus, in my eyes, 2.5 Dimensional Seduction presents an ideal of the otaku pride. If you love this thing, then you won't ever care about what other people say about it. Yes, people will look at you weird, they will mock you and you probably won't have as many people to talk about it as you'd hope, but you should never feel ashamed for the things you love.
This is why 2.5D Seduction is a manga that I hold in such high regard, and one which I dare say I love.

But I don't just love it's themes of being an Otaku, which I hope i've proven here. I also love it's portrayal of cosplaying and how it affected the way I look at the people that partake in it, gaining a new perspective on a hobby I never thought much about. I love it's romance plotline about learning to trust people again, and how i saw myself reflected on those themes. I love how so many of it's characters speak to me personally about the experiences I've had when being an otaku and being a teenager.
But before I loved any of those things, before the manga turned into the cosplay-as-a-sport romcom narrative that it did, and before I realized just how much I related to these characters, I had also loved to read what once was a generic ecchi manga about a girl wearing a sexy costume. And those ecchi elements, while not as heavily present as they once were, are still there even 150+ chapters later. 2.5 Dimensional Seduction's manga is, among a myriad of other things, an ecchi manga.

It is in this, despite it's great work at portraying every other part of the story, that this anime adaptation fails to fully encapsulate all of what I loved about it's source material. No matter how you want to look at it, the show is ashamed of the fact that it's source material is ecchi. You can see it in the changes to the outfits, you can see it in the scenes that are cut, the ones that change angles to avoid showing much skin, and the ones where the camera looks away. To take those elements, which are a part of the original material, and remove them to this degree, feels like nothing short of an insult to those of us who liked them. It's telling me that those elements were not good, that I shouldn't have liked them in the first place. It's telling me that the show is better without them, as if they have no worth.

And the worst part of all this? I am here, complaining to you, instead of talking about the many things I love about the show. Its unfortunate, because the show is great adaptation. I loved watching every episode week after week, getting to see the early arcs of the manga getting animated. I loved hearing the voice actors perform their roles, especially Mikarin's seiyuu. I loved seeing the opening and ending themes, my favorite being the first ED theme. I particularly loved seeing the in-universe anime of Ashford Wars, which was barely ever seen in the manga, getting animated scenes which were clearly crafted with love for the medium (the 4:3 ratio!!). I loved reading the author's own commentary as he spoke about the experience of first writing the manga every week on twitter. In general, I just really really loved seeing the adaptation of a manga which i had deeply enjoyed before.
But in all of this, I could never truly get rid of the awful feeling that came with seeing the scenes altered to tone down the original material. I couldn't get rid of the idea that the show would have been more popular and enjoyed by more people if it had dared to keep the pantyshots. And I very much couldn't get rid of all the people talking about how the ecchi was removed, which really ruined my enjoyment of the show when it came to discussing it online, and pretty much forcing me to enjoy it on my own rather than have people to share my passion with.

Ultimately, if I were to give it a score without taking this whole thing into account, I'd probably give it a 7. It's not a particularly stellar adaptation, but it does have it's moments of beauty, and it's a really fun thing to watch for anyone who likes the source material. I'd argue the manga is more visually stimulating and the pacing works better in that format, but that's probably up to you.

But I can't review this without taking the changes into account.
Because it's adapting a story that tells you to not be ashamed of who you are, while being ashamed of what it is. And that's probably the greatest sin it could have made as far as I care.