My experience with Makiene has made me feel the slightest bit out of place. I look around and see that everyone had such wonderful experiences with this anime. And that makes me happy. But that isn't my Makiene.

For me part of the charm of Makiene was that it was nothing special. It didn't have to be unique. It didn't have to break new ground. It just had to be what it wanted to be.

An heartfelt romance that shows us that it doesn't all end after the love confession.

The comedy in this story is good. It isn't anything special but I don't think it needs to try and be anything special. Not every joke lands but for Makiene, not every joke has to land. It isn't about that.
The story is an emotional narrative about the difficult feelings that come with rejection and the need to move on and the humour works really well as it creates segments that have the feeling of coming up for air after drowning in the emotions of these girls.

However, despite the great depth of these girls stories it bothered me just how empty our protagonist felt. I just spent 12 episodes looking at the world through his eyes and yet I do not feel like I know him at all. Does he not have a past? Something that makes him tick? The cause for the personality that causes him to want to avoid the drama? All I can say I know is that he is straight and likes water.

In a story such as this the personality and experiences of the protagonist is crucial. How can we trust this guy to help these girls with their problems. We need to either get a glimpse into his or see the reason why he doesn't have one.
I believe that a character that has given up on being interesting is interesting because it is outside normality for a character to lack characteristics.

I tend to have many issues with romances similar to Makiene and I often find myself in the same situation when I am watching or reading them. So many romances want to be the one to break the norm. They want to be the one to subvert the genre. Makiene is no exception and that annoys me.

I got the feeling that the story thinks it is a subversion of the genre that it is in but it has completely missed the mark. Shonen romances were made with the purpose of capturing the audience of young men that felt unseen in shojou romance. But long gone are the days when subverting a shojou romance was unique. Sometimes I even feel that anime like Makiene don't even know that what they are actually trying to subvert is a shojou romance. Makiene is about the stories of losing heroines but they are the losing heroines of a story described to the audience in a way that sounds a lot like a shojou romance but all the girls follow the tropes of a shonen romance. Im sorry if I am making this sound confusing but my point is that I think the story lacks a consistent idea of what it is trying to do with it's genre.

All it had to do is be itself the fact that it actively tries to differentiate itself from others has ironically made itself the same as all the rest.

A real subversion of the Shonen romcom genre is "Kaguya-sama: Love is war". The reason why that anime made waves was because it was different to the other shonen romcoms that existed. It just happened to be that in order to subvert the genre that Makiene has placed itself in was to do the opposite of what Makiene did.

But at the end of the day the reason people watch these kinds of anime isn't for some deep or philosophical reason. It isn't to break new grounds in the artform. The downsides of Makiene is that it couldn't settle for being simply being an anime within an already existing genre - it had to try and break new ground.

The romantic comedy genre is one I am heavily invested in and so it is a big deal for when an anime tries to do something new. But I do not think that it is crucial for an anime to be different from the rest. It doesn't have to be unique, or make waves. It can just be itself. Nothing more, nothing less.

The only thing holding back Makiene from being a true masterpiece was it's desire to be a masterpiece