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This anime made me sad. And mostly not in the way the creators intended.

Watching this last season was a frustrating experience. I absolutely loved the first season of Oregairu. It was funny with just a bit of drama thrown in to make it interesting. I liked the second season, but that was when I started seeing the issues that would come to plague the third season and make me question if I was even still enjoying what I was watching.

The comedy:

The second season, and definitely this last one was completely devoid of any comedy beyond witty dialogue that was essentially just repeats of jokes from ... the very first season. The characters change, but the comedy does not change along with them to fit what they become. It’s sad, because what initially drew me to this series was that I found the first season very funny.

The drama:

My problem is that I started to hate the “drama” being introduced. In the first season it was very much focused on the individual characters, their shortcoming and flawed actions. However, at some point the authors must have decided to go full teenage romance drama mode. Except they didn’t fully commit to that. I don’t think that the following is a spoiler, more of a piece of advice to make watching this season more bearable, maybe even thoroughly enjoyable: this show is a romantic drama, and don’t let it fool you into thinking it’s anything other than that. All the sadness, all the drama around the main characters’ relationships boils down to romance, but the characters insist on calling it different things, and acting like there are problems that don’t actually exist in order to manufacture drama. After all, if they didn’t, this entire last season would be unnecessary and everything could’ve been resolved at the end of season two.

Looking back, this becomes obvious. Oregairu isn’t one of those shows that spells everything out for the lowest common denominator, and I respect that and really enjoyed it at first. However, that approach only works when the viewer can reasonably follow along and successfully infer what is happening and what isn’t being said. This worked well at first, it isn’t hard to figure out what’s going, and the major development are pretty predictable. Or so I thought. Instead, the characters delude themselves and each other and spew bs born from lines of reasoning that are completely nonsensical to the point where I was left completely confused and had no idea why the hell the characters were even having a disagreement, only to find out when the conclusion finally came in episode 11 of S3 that it really was just a love triangle all along. (I don’t count that as a spoiler since it becomes blatantly obvious in S2 and can easily be predicted in S1.) The one I blame most for this is the character of Yukinoshita Haruno, the older sister of Yukino.

Yukinoshita Haruno:

Looking back with full knowledge of what “the truth” was in the end, I get the impression that she’s meant to be a character who’s had a difficult life with messed up relationships and a distorted worldview, and so her view of others’ relationship is equally distorted leading her to be exceedingly cynical. She is ultimately the main source of most of the drama in this show. Because of what I described above, some of the assertions she makes make no sense at all, and the fact that she really likes to be suggestive instead of coming out and saying what she means makes it even harder to follow along. Worse yet, since, unlike the viewer, the other characters are not real people with any understanding of human relationships, they never question the nonsense she says. The first time that her word is questioned in any way other than “I don’t like what you said and don’t agree, but I can’t back it up so you must be right” is in episode 11 of season 3, where, as I mentioned before, magically everything becomes clear and a conclusion is reached.

Why is this a problem? The character of Yukinoshita Haruno doesn’t make any sense without hindsight. As I was watching the show, I went from thinking that she was just an antagonist messing with the mc to utter confusion, and the show held me in that state of utter confusion for half of its runtime. It feels as if she was a synthetic source of drama, creating problems in the main characters’ relationships that had no reason for existing, and I hated it, because drama that doesn’t make sense to me is drama that I can’t sympathise with, and what’s the point in that?

Other things:

I haven’t touched on basics like character writing and all that stuff, since that wasn’t what I wanted to convey with this review, but here we go.

Art: nothing special. It’s not good and it’s not bad. What did you expect? It’s a slice of life.

Music: Same as art. The opening and ending songs are pretty good, but also not exceptional.

Characters are meh, the main characters are enjoyable to watch, but, I guess two-dimensional? They’re not a flat wall painted in a single colour, but they often don’t quite feel human either. I was ok with this and allowed myself to wallow in my suspension of disbelief in the first season because I enjoyed it, but as other problems popped up later on it became frustrating sometimes that they couldn’t just act as humans would. Their development also feels poorly executed. It’s definitely there, but only when the show feels like it, and other times it pretends that nothing’s changed. Side characters are almost all a case of “this is what they’re like on the surface, but this is what they’re actually like” with no further development.

Enjoyment:

Overall, I mostly enjoyed this show. I fear that this was in large part due to my investment in the characters from the first season. I find myself both wanting to love it and hate it, and I can’t quite decide, because I’m someone who falls in love with characters too easily and wants to see more of them. Overall, I give the series an 8 (still better than most of the crap out there), but this last season was so frustrating that I can only give a 6. It’s fine.

Recommendation:

The first season is worth it, but the second and third are increasingly less worth it. I doubt you’re here having seen the first two and wondering whether to watch the third (just do it and see the conclusion yourself, who chooses to stop watching in the middle, what’s wrong with you?) so I’ll say this: Go ahead and watch Oregairu if you have nothing genuinely good to watch right now. Overall, it’s pretty good, it just gets progressively worse, but once you’ve watched the first season I’m certain you’ll want to see it through to the end anyway.

Thanks for reading. This review is way too long, it’s my first review ever since I only just decided to use this as a way to get my thoughts about an anime out of my head, so I’m sorry if this was poorly written. I’ll try to do better next time.