Dec 22, 2021
Komi Can't Communicate is about a guy who meets a socially awkward girl who can't talk to others due to her anxiety and tries to help her make 100 friends throughout the school year. See, the problem is...she's already the most popular girl in the class! Problem solved. So you might be asking yourself then, "what the fuck are we doing for the next 12 episodes?" Well, apparently even though every student in the class will go out of their way to defend her when some no life tries to make a move on Komi-san, they won't actually talk with her and be actual friends.
...
So everyone basically cares but doesn't care at the same time.
Everyone except for our protagonist, Hitohito Tadano.
Since he'd have no other purpose in this show than to be the unreasonably helpful main character, Tadano breaks out of his comfort zone to help Komi make 100 friends throughout the school year because she's the prettiest girl he's ever seen and not because he knows for a fact that she's a genuinely good person who's simply flawed when it comes to socializing. The rest of the show basically just plays out as a generic slice of life with a ton of shounen tropes mixed in, like your typical beach episode where the boys just stare at the girls' swimsuits the whole time like you've seen a million times before. It's like the show tries to be purposefully unoriginal when in fact it could've at least made it more interesting with some deeper conflict involving the entire cast, which consisted of a diverse number of characters, being focused on to add on to Komi-san’s personal issues.
Speaking of which, they’re very lightly focused on. The story does give some sense of progression, like when Komi-san starts to open up towards Tadano by squeaking out words every now and then, but it feels like it's forced since the depth of her struggle is barely touched in detail, so the audience basically just has to wait for some kind of clarification from the plot to try to figure out what’s going on with her. It just feels very slow and uneventful, like we’re going through a bunch of pointless slice of life filler for no reason. And that’s pretty much the whole story.
As for the characters, they’re essentially what makes this show such a horrible experience. All of the characters are defined by simple attributes that are overused to death and as a result show no hints of any nuance. Tadano is pretty much your cliched mc who’s defined by his naivety and behaves however the story wants him to behave in that specific moment. While all of these characters are simple shounen paper cutouts, they’re at least somewhat tolerable since the story treats them like normal high school students. Komi, on the other hand, is not. In fact, she’s the main reason what makes this show nearly unwatchable. Kinda like Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion, the story treats her like she’s treated like she’s the center of the universe, but at least in that show I could sympathize with Shinji because he only received attention from others because he was specifically needed to perform actions for others’ sake, and it was only for that reason he received praise and encouragement. Komi, on the other hand, just shows up to school without making an example of herself at all and yet she's treated as the center of attention just because she’s attractive, and thus receives constant encouragement from others because of and not because of actual talent or purpose. While this may not be necessarily contrived, it makes the audience wonder, “why should we give two shits about a kid who doesn’t need to make any sort of effort to gain attention from others?” If Komi was set up as an “average-looking” girl, the show would ultimately fail due to the lack of interest from her classmates, but at least I’ve been given some reason to sympathize with her in some way. Instead what we got was nothing more than a self-insert mary sue that’s well-liked by everyone and hated by no one (except that one grumpy asshole Convent). Now if this was the point of the story, it honestly would’ve worked a lot better. There are plenty of main characters who take advantage of others throughout their respective stories but have nuanced motivations for doing so, like Makoto Itou for example. If Komi was portrayed as a self-centered bitch who clearly takes advantage of boys her age who think with their dick, it would’ve at least made more sense from a storytelling standpoint, plus there might've even been some room for some extra development besides forcibly making her capable of talking. And with that, I've finally made my point as to why these characters are insufferable to watch.
Now on to other matters, the artwork. So far I’ve only seen praise coming from people, but I’m gonna be the fish swimming up the water and say it was bad. I can at least find some kind of enjoyment in an objectively bad show if it has good visuals, but Komi Can’t Communicate was not one of them. The animation itself was decent, but nothing really special. The entire casts’ appearance can be described as My Hero Academia knock offs with the only defining traits being their hair and chest size. Even those traits are ridiculously often over the top and unrealistic for the high school setting it’s trying to set up, but then again, it is a shounen, so I won’t hold it that much against it. There’s also the constant adoration of Komi-san’s face and how it basically carries the show from being a drag like it was for me, and I’m gonna be honest, it’s pretty overrated. Up close her face really bothered me as her mouth looked disproportioned from her chin and nose, and her lips it’s way too small too. She’s like a 3 in my book. Maybe her disfigured face made her handicapped and she can’t talk to others because of that, or she thinks her face is ugly too. That probably is the reason. Anyway, I digress.
The comedy is what you’d expect from any shounen, drawn out gags centering around toilet humor that expect you’re laughing your ass off. I’m not really going to go into it, but there’s a decent number of jokes regarding one of the character’s sexuality, as they’re described as being non-binary if I remember correctly. I’m fine with that kind of thing if the show desires to have it so badly, but the show shouldn’t go out of its way to portray what are almost acts of sexual assault to get some kind of point across regarding this topic. Just when I thought Japanese entertainment was safe from this kind of thing unlike America, this show was basically an example of Japan flipping me off.
Well, I guess I can recommend this show if you’re a 10-year-old who along with the main cast also gets turned on by Komi-san’s disfigured appearance. But to anyone else, there’s a whole genre to this sort of thing that actually does it at least somewhat better most of the time. If you were looking for a show that features a character who struggles to overcome social anxiety and pressure, I guarantee you’ll feel the same way I did after watching this.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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