Chunibyo is the greatest anime about insane people since American Psycho. It’s twelve episodes of watching a girl be affirmed in her belief that she is some kind of extra-dimensional wizard all because the main character, Yuuta, wants to get in her pants. It’s pretty much a message of “be who you want to be” told in a way that makes you embarrassed to be who you want to be. It affirmed for me that as a forty year old man it was okay to go out in public and pretend to be a wizard to get into children’s birthday parties. My dad died, it’s my way of coping dammit!

Our hero is Yuuta, a delusional little weirdo who spent his middle school years pretending to be the Dark Flame Master, which is totally a name he stole from a Yu-Gi-Oh card. As he rolled about in the grass wearing a trench coat like I used to do at children’s birthday parties, a young Rikka Takanashi watches on and finds that being extremely autistic comes with benefits like everyone leaving you alone and nobody questioning your life choices. Feeling that this could temper the psychological crises she faces, she takes on a ridiculous persona, throws on an eyepatch, and goes down the rabbit hole to become anime’s ultimate Girl You Would Totally Avoid in Real Life but Because This is Anime You’re Completely in Love.

Yuuta meets her in high school when he’s decided to reshape his image and attempt to be a normal person. In befriending her he gets tangled up in all kinds of wacky shenanigans. Along the way he befriends:

-A girl with narcolepsy who creates a club for narcoleptics that is co-opted by the SOS Brigade.

-A girl who is trying to remake her image and be successful and popular but is foiled because the active Chuni characters are so bizarre they have multiple printings of messages from a middle school weirdo posted on a message board.

-A girl who is essentially Rikka’s slave and one of the worst characters in anime history.

This cavalcade of failure comes together in a club that exists for whatever reason and does whatever for reasons.

The Chuni bits are when you get to see the characters in over-the-top delusional fights that in real life are portrayed as pathetic. It’s a constant reminder of how sad and ridiculous the characters are. Yet the anime counterbalances how mentally handicapped this comes across by glorifying these activities as a way to escape the harshness of reality and a necessary evil in the fight against being a bland, boring, depressed person. In fact, the anime’s major conflict toward the end is Rikka being forced to be a normal girl and Yuuta realizing how this is making her way more moody and way less easy to find some magical way to manipulate into banging.

In all seriousness whether you like this show or not depends entirely on how much you can put up with from Rikka especially. If you’re annoyed by her early on you’ll never be able to find the appeal of Chunibyo. If you love her and how she acts, you’ll relish every second of this show. But I think you’re supposed to be both annoyed and attached to Rikka. You’re supposed to sigh at how pathetic she is but also relate to the circumstances for her being the way she is and how Yuuta has been her crutch through so much hardship.

Deep down in Chunibyo you’ll find a romance that is touching and multi-layered. The drama doesn’t feel forced and weaves through the show quite nicely, culminating in a lovely if rushed and somewhat disappointing finish.

There is some humor here and there but never enough to take away from the core romance and drama. In fact, the only real humor is in how pathetic Rikka, Deko, and the other characters can be. So, again, if you’re not into the characters early on and don’t feel like you can invest in people so ridiculous, this is a show that won’t work.

And I still don’t know if this is condemning being a Chuni or celebrating it. Is it saying to curb your depression by acting like a lunatic? I’m getting so many mixed signals. While the end is a fitting one that punctuates the romantic element it also has me questioning if it’s really the right thing to do. Like, should you be a depressed normal human being or that crazy person people avoid like a leper? Can Rikka operate in the real world at a job or something if Yuuta facilitates her acting like such a bizarr-o? I mean, I did the birthday wizard thing until the cops started asking around...and after that I got hooked on anime to quench my thirst for delusions and children…

Chunibyo is a beautifully animated show with a nice romance at the core and a bunch of crazy characters I love (except for Dekomori. I would curb stomp her in an instant). Even Yuuta feels like a more three-dimensional character than you’d expect him to be.

That said, I can’t tell if Chunibyo is a celebration of being a pretend wizard or a condemnation of it. Either way this is a solid series and one of the better KyoAni projects of recent years.