So the first five or so minutes of the first episode is the part where all the people ate up for some reason and it apparently managed to leave such an impact that people thought that this show was going to be good just from those five minutes alone. So this girl can read other people's minds, but her feelings get hurt because she doesn't realize she has such powers, and she's a bit insensitive because she was young. Alright, that's not too bad so far. It's fairly realistic as far as fictional mind reading powers go, but then stuff happens. Namely, the "everyone is conveniently an asshole and stupid" cliche- Where if you are too lazy to give a character a well written tragic backstory, then fuck it, just force it! Just make everything around them happen conveniently to drag them down! What makes me baffled is that it's not like the writers did not have the time to devote a whole episode for this; Instead, it's just rushed and feels completely forced, leading to an extremely lazy writing. In its original form as a 4Koma comic, this wouldn't be a necessity, but as an adaptation, I think it needs some more attention especially if you're trying to tell a serious story.
So, apparently Kotoura remains stupid about her mind reading powers while growing up and doesn't learn to shut up about it, and eventually pisses off her parents because her father is the most irresponsible father ever and her mother is just genuinely retarded. Instead of believing multiple doctors claiming that Kotoura is not a compulsive liar, she decides to believe her homeroom teacher who says she is. Who needs those PHDs? Then she sort of ditches Kotoura in her grandfather's house, and then the actual plot happens. Well, not before showing us that Kotoura gets more traumatic experience out of her favorite cat not being at the usual spot than being ditched by her parents. Brilliant. She eventually comes across the main character while still showing off that she can read minds, although she fully realizes that she's going to get her feelings hurt anyways about it because she's retarded- And what a surprise, the main character's mind is all wacky and funny! It's almost like some people honestly don't give a shit about Kotoura for once because she's the most important person ever! Realism! This apparently causes Kotoura to take interest just because he just so happened to not pay attention to her presence like every other human being that was ever around Kotoura in her life. That being said, this main character is awfully written too. He's solely characterized by his wacky silly perverted mind, and the writers can't seem to stop making overdone jokes about this, and this continues to drag on every episode in this show. Of course, outside of this, he acts like the most generic main character ever and serves as a white knight of sorts to Kotoura because everyone around her happens to be conveniently a dick just so that the main character can have a role.
But wait, there's more! More dumb characters are introduced; Daichi and Yuriko. They're both members of some stupid ESP research club, which I don't see how it got approved in the first place. Yuriko's initial plan was to use Kotoura's ability to prove to people that psychics were real because her mom died because nobody believed that she was a psychic. Now, I don't see how showing off that Kotoura is psychic proves whether her mom was ever a psychic in the first place, but that'd be too logical. Furthermore, why would Kotoura even agree to help Yuriko when clearly mind reading only makes her depressed? There's literally no reason.
But there was a reason after all- The show uses this as an excuse to introduce the next half-assed character. This character is named Moritani, and she is in love with the main character because of whole ten seconds they shared in the past. This causes her to get jealous of Kotoura because she was attracting all the attention from the main character. And then the next part is just awful: Kotoura makes a mistake, and accidentally ends up reading someone else's mind, so clearly this means that she has to actively target someone visually to read their mind. It's not something passive where she just 'hears' other people's minds. Therefore, she can technically just choose not to read minds at all, which is precisely what she doesn't do ever and she barfs all over herself because that's what people do when they're depressed and realize that others think badly of you. Then the main character defends Kotoura because she gets bullied yet again despite it being her own fault completely, which triggers Moritani to become even more jealous and causes her to order her friends to beat him up. Yeah, I'd call someone else to beat my secret love interest too because that's a smart thing to do. And she even manages to ask for help from people associated with her family dojo, so it's clearly impossible for that someone to realize she was responsible for it.
So at this point, it should be pretty noticeable that every 'drama' in this series is half-assed, forced, and just completely caused because the characters are mentally deficient. It's like watching a movie about zombie apocalypse where everything bad happens only because the characters are dumb and one just lets the zombies in because he thought he needed some fresh air- Except worse, because at least those movies are visually fun- This show is just boring, forced conflicts happening just for the sake of having a conflict. Then they constantly try to cram what they classify as "comedy" in, which includes a scene where the main character imagines Kotoura in a swimsuit or something. It's like the writers can't make up their mind about what they wanted to write, so they just taped the two together without any regard for transition. And unfortunately the show only gets worse from here- The show eventually introduces a mystery arc, where in theory, it should be interesting in conjunction with Kotoura's mind-reading powers.
Summary of the "mystery" arc: Kotoura does something stupid and she gets into a trouble. In this particular case, she walks alone at night when she fully realizes it's dangerous to do so because there's a culprit somewhere in the local area, meets a person who's pretty much a stranger at this point, and follows that person only to realize that person was the culprit all along. This sort of twist would make Shyamalan shake his head in disapproval. And then the last episode just quickly resolves the whole mother-Kotoura conflict that the series has been building up to for the entire cour in five minutes. Brilliant pacing.
Considering how much useless filler there was in this series, this wouldn't really be classified as "rushed." Now one may argue that since this is an adaptation of a 4-koma comic, you shouldn't expect a well-written story. But that is the silliest argument, because if the series is going to attempt to take itself seriously, then it should be treated as such. The fact is simple; They tried to cram some drama in and failed pretty hard. Hopefully after this show, people won't decide that a show is going to be "good" just from the first five minutes of the first episode.
