365 Days to the Wedding

If you want to see two blossoming love between two autistic adults, then this is the perfect anime for you!!! The premise of the story is a forced marriage situation and in the end, they do develop feelings for each other, so that is predictable, but the strength of this show are its characters and how they navigate the theme of marriage.

For our main couple, we have Rika-san who's obsessed with maps and topography and Takuya who's obsessed with his cat Tama. Takuya can be described as a chill guy and passive with his way of going about his life. One of the main story arc and development that he goes through is to be more assertive, as I'm pretty sure he went through with the marriage proposal only because it was suggested to him. Rika's development concerns her shutting a part of herself off and not letting her childlike personality come through, as we can see when she plays with her maps. This developed only because she was left by herself when she was young because her mother was away often and so she had to grow up and be a big girl. So she shuts away the emotional side and let the logical side of her dictate her personality, as she plans out literally everything, including conversations and dates for their fake marriage. It's very elaborate. As a result of this, their fake marriage feels very robotic because they're trying to be considerate of each other, but it's to the degree of overthinking simple things. At first I did find it annoying, but they are progressing each episode in their own quirky way to being somewhat functional and heartwarming.

The setting is your typical office romance, with the twist being that this is a travel agency. Generally, authors employ the office setting because they don't care about the setting, but this anime does play up the traveling theme a bit with scenes of popular spots in Japan, as our main character goes on dates in them.

The side characters don't have as much depth as our couples have, but the show continues to use them for the theme of marriage and connects them to our couple. There is Gonda, the single guy that has a crush on the pretty Komiya. Not much happened with these two but he did get into a dating situation with a fellow fan group buddy, who happened to have a kid. She asked if he was ready to take care of her and the kid, but he hesitated and she took that as a no. Another episode happens with Shinshi, a middle aged man who is happily married with a boy, but one day got divorced. He thought he was doing everything well, but he never considered his wife feelings, which have been put on the back burner. These situations with the side characters happen all the time in real life, and they serve as a reminder that marriage is difficult and require a lot of work for it to function well.