Back to smoothw's Profile smoothw's Profile

An odd duck of a show, in that it takes a trashy premise (stepsiblings falling in love) and tries to give a plausibly realistic take on it, but does it in an excessively slow paced and mundane manner. The show is always on a knife edge between being small and relatable and being a total sleep aide. The closest comparison might be one of those live action japanese Iyashikei shows that have very light drama, but are really about watching a person eat for twenty minutes. Except, this show really doesn't provide a much of healing sensation, Every episode is basically structured around three ... or four conversations between our two protagonists about very mundane things like who's going to cook breakfast or whether they should go to the pool as part of a friends outing, with occasional inner monologues that are like "oh, do I like him?". Comic relief is provided by the male protagonist's slightly older female coworker who flirts with him. So, not very much going on, and it doesn't help that that the characters come off as excessively closed off from each other (and themselves) a plausible argument could be made that they are suffering from some kind of PTSD. On the other hand, i feel compelled to watch til the end, and I think the director has found a distinct aesthetic despite this being a show that doesn't really escape the limited animation sludge. So, ymmv, but it's something different from the normal light novel romcom adaptationsthat are so omnipresent in anime currently.

Hugely entertaining in a campy way, this is a hideous looking martial arts anime from 2003 where a giant teenage girl engages in fights for no particular reasons and hangs out with her group of girlfriends including one of the biggest gremlins you will find in anime. The general vibe is basically Baki except the plot is a more straightforward "meet someone, fight someone" type of formula. The characters the main character fights do hang around, and there is a vague tournament plot in the latter half of the anime, but trust me it is not important at all. The finale is particularly nonsensical. Visually, ... it was made right at that transition from cell to digital where most anime looked real bad, and this one in particular the faces just look derpy and frequently off model The fights do look perfectly decent although probably not anything to attract modern sakuga fans. Saying that, this show is entertaining because it knows it's a stupid romp, and it fully delivers at being a romp.

Peak cheesy but cute romance show. It's an obvious male fantasy - "the cute model and nerdy boy fall in love because he hangs around all the time and is nice, oh and she's a big dork too" but the usual crassness of this kind of thing is downplayed (although it's still there) to emphasize comedy and characters blushing and talking past each other. I wouldn't necessarily recommend binging it like I did because the lack of subplots and plot twists means that every episode kind of follows the same formula. Unlike most romantic comedies there are not really any romantic rivals, love triangles, or ... barriers put up to keep the characters apart. Instead, every episode has one or several times where something mundane happens, the male character freaks out or is confused, and then the incident ends in a way that it's obvious the pair have grown closer. For a lot of viewers, I'm sure it was refreshing that the show is about a relationship that progresses instead of stretching things out until there was a confession of love (or handholding, first kiss etc) in the final episode, for me there was the opposite problem of by the time the two main characters are hugging each other constantly or having emotionally intimate conversations, I didn't need the guy to go "uwu does she really like me, are we really even friends" every time.

Another criticism I have is probably because of the source material, in that the main male character in episode one is presented as a bit of an edgy type who literally is fantasizing about killing the popular girl, but that's dropped almost immediately to where he's a more typical audience surrogate character- a sort of hasty change in editorial direction seems obvious. Anyway, it's still a pretty winning show that feels pretty in line with other big romcoms of this current era of anime, so I would recommend it.