I finished this season in an afternoon; obviously it's great. What I love about anime is its shameless desire to "cut to the point": each arc (of a few episodes each) deals with one of the characters' internal struggles with trying to be themselves. How do we learn about this emotional turmoil? Not through subtle changes in mood or dialogue, since that would take far too long. No, the emotions literally distort reality in the obvious metaphorical way, with the protagonist being the only one who can fix it. A girl is struggling going unnoticed in school? She literally disappears from people's views. It's a perfect way of getting inside characters' emotions, I love it. It helps that the characters are well-written, the issues are subtle, interesting, and treated delicately, and the girls are cute as hell. Obviously I recommend it, and below I'm just going to talk about some of the things about this anime that I find cool.

First, despite the contrivances that I mentioned in my introduction, the characters and plot development stay surprisingly believable. I've been watching American sitcoms lately, and there it's common for an emotional thread to resolve in the universe's equivalent of a couple days, and the sitcom equivalent of an episode. This show gives the conflict so much more time to breathe, which I think gives it a totally unique pacing and atmosphere. Perhaps with the exception of the first arc, whose pacing is similar to that of a movie (e.g. A Silent Voice), this show takes significant time to live with the problem before working towards fixing it. For example, in Koga's arc, none of the characters do that much, and the character exploration that comes with spending time with Koga is only tied back into her Puberty Syndrome (what the show calls the world distortion) fairly late, in just the final episode. Sakuta (the protagonist) simply goes along with Koga and doesn't question her more unhealthy behaviors, even as she leads them into a silly web of lies. This allows us to take a couple of episodes to experience the world as she sees it, without judgment, before she takes the step to grow and acknowledge her issues, fixing the Puberty Syndrome.

As I alluded to above, the relaxed pace is primarily because of how passive our protagonist acts. Whenever Sakuta recognizes a case of Puberty Syndrome, he doesn't immediately move to fixing it: he'll just feel things out and try to understand the girl afflicted until she's ready to deal with it (with his support). When Futaba splits into two people, he doesn't do much more than just talk to each of them and hear them out on how they're feeling, and this goes on for weeks. I really like that narrative choice, to have the protagonist not cast judgment on other characters, and just act as a supportive friend. This choice recasts the aspects of growing up that Puberty Syndrome encapsulates as experiences to empathize with and not problems to be solved. I think the anime feels surprisingly kind and considerate as a result, in a way no one-episode plotline could convey. I also think the way these plots resolve and characters progress feels very real, despite all contrivances. When you have a problem with yourself, whether from anxiety, self-hatred, jealousy, ennui, or whatever, you don't fix it in a couple days with a life-changing experience. You live with the feeling for a while, and then with the right support you see and acknowledge why you feel the way you do. The girls here fix Puberty Syndrome in the same way. It's earnest and true-to-life.

By the way, I should mention that the "canon" explanation for Puberty Syndrome (often some odd interpretation of quantum physics) is by far the weakest part of this anime. I'm okay with suspending my disbelief and being okay with this "magical-realism" type premise that when teenage girls get stressed weird stuff happens to reality: the explanations that use physics are unneeded and serve no purpose. (The explanations of "hey, she's probably under some mental stress" are fine, of course.)

Besides that, this anime shines in its minor details. Sakuta and Mai's dialogue is top-notch in both its serious and comedic moments, and their feelings are more often conveyed by what they don't say, instead of what they do say. It's nice how their relationship is maintained throughout other arcs, and how the events affect how they feel about each other (like how Mai gets a bit jealous of Koga over time). It's probably the strongest facet of this anime. The tragedy of Kaede's predicament slowly builds before hitting all at once, giving serious depth to her behavior in previous episodes. (To be honest I kinda wish this arc was earlier so Sakuta's personality could be fleshed out earlier? I find him a bit bland relative to the girls, since he has to keep his own emotions on a tight leash to help the others.) And did I mention how cute the girls are? Mai's bunny suit isn't even her cutest outfit, honestly. Good stuff.