Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Comedy wa Machigatteiru. Zoku

I don’t know about you, but my high school years were… not very exciting. I spent a lot of time by myself, reading in the corner of the classroom or somewhere quiet in the library at lunch. I had a group of friends, yeah, but there were only a few that I’d ever really talk to. Even then, I’d always decline if they ever asked me to go out somewhere, telling them about how busy I was or how I “had other plans”.

I never said much. I remember a few of my classmates sometimes asking why I was so quiet all the time, why ... I only tried to just sit there and read. I never knew how to answer. That was just how I was, I guess – I didn’t like talking, and I wasn’t very comfortable around most people. Why? I’d tell you I was shy, but I wouldn’t be saying very much. And it’s not like I was bullied or anything – no one picked on me or hated me in particular. I might’ve preferred being by myself, sure, but I still had a few friends – it wasn’t like I hated being around people. I think someone called me mute once.

It’s been almost a year since I graduated and I’ve… moved on… since then, but I’d be lying if I said it’s all just in the past. When we graduated, that was that – some of us went to the same university, some didn’t. I ended up cutting ties with most of those who didn’t, and I still don’t find myself talking a whole lot with those who did. But, hey, at the very least I’ve come to realise how silly I used to be, trying to stay away from people like the plague – it’s all just a natural part of growing up, and only now did I get the chance to finally join the club.

OreGairu understands this. All of it. Everything. You see it in the slight furrow of Hikigaya’s brow as his head rests on his palm, eyes brooding over to the noisiest parts of the classroom. You see it in the droop of his shoulders, hands finding solace where his trouser pockets were, as his bag bounces in perfect rhythm to each of his slow, dreary steps. OreGairu knows what it’s like to sit in that corner of the classroom, by yourself, never talking, with you finding your mouth a little stale when it’s time to leave because it’s been closed for so long. It’s just that OreGairu… does not think these things are silly.

People are weird. We say one thing when we mean the opposite, we’re quick to find flaws but we’re not quick to trust. We’re nasty for the sake of nastiness, and we’re still all sorts of vicious to others even when we don’t know it. People are complex and hard to understand, incredibly strange and all sorts of unpredictable – no one plays by exactly the same rules, and we will never reach a perfect understanding of each other no matter how hard we try. I’m with Hikigaya on this one: why do we still keep trying to get caught up in this mess when we know it’ll just cause us all sorts of problems later?

…Or that’s what I’d be saying a year ago, at least. Because to someone like Hikigaya – someone like me, in the past – we can’t explain why people find themselves inevitably drawn to each other anyway.

Because to OreGairu, you don’t need to.

It’s how when you strip away all of his self-defeating cynicism and hateful snark, Hikigaya is actually a pretty ordinary teenage boy, with all the same desire, jealousy, and fear as any other. We see it when he’s with Komachi: he’s not with the outside world anymore, he’s with someone he knows. He’s calm, he’s open, and she listens while he lets out all of his deepest wounds, all of his most buried secrets. It’s no surprise, of course, when they’re family – they’ve been there for each other for fifteen years, and they’ll be there for another fifteen more. Hikigaya says he lives the way he does because he has no other choice, but that’s not true – he lives the way he does because he doesn’t trust the world enough to share himself with it, to share the Hikigaya that banters so naturally and playfully with his little sister.

But it’s a slow process. OreGairu only manages to give us a vague eventuality, a “one day he’ll change” kind of thing, because it takes actually spending time with your closest friends to realise how far you’ve managed to distance yourself from them in the first place. Hikigaya’s finally starting to open himself up to the world, even if just a little, and through OreGairu we see how that can have profound effects on other people. Even then, he still doesn’t get anything more from those who aren’t close to him than a “you’ve kinda changed”, with them finding him only slightly less boring to look at. Because… that’s how it is. Because it’s the small things like that that show how, someday, maybe when he’s dusting off one of his old yearbooks he found in his garage, he’ll be able to look back on this moment as just an embarrassing memory – when he could say he was more open, honest, and true to himself than ever before.

My birthday’s coming up in a few weeks. I’ve never been to many parties, but maybe I’ll invite a few people to a movie or something. I know I won’t change in a week, and I certainly won’t change tomorrow, but in a year, maybe two, I might not be saying the same. OreGairu gave me a chance, and I’m not letting it go. But I can thank it later. For now, it’s time to turn OreGairu off – I have some old friends to catch up on.

MOD EDIT -*The review contains spoilers*-



Oregairu has really built up quite a reputation ever since it first aired didn’t it? Whilst the reaction to it was a mixed bag of “Haganai if it was actually good” and “ugh, this is pretentious garbage” back in 2013, two years of steadily increasing attention from the light novel community and such have turned it into the only post-Spice and Wolf light novel adaptation that people can say is actually good with a straight face. The fact that Studio feel was attached to the new season did make some people moo a bit, but not enough to prevent it ... from reaching the top 100 on MAL upon airing of the first episode. And of course, with huge popularity comes a huge and quite frankly f*cking awful fanbase that I’m going to swiftly ignore because I have it on good authority that reading their comments actually causes eye cancer and it shouldn’t really affect any personal judgments about the show anyways.

As for my own personal judgment, I remember being really harsh against this show back when it first aired, but I honestly can’t remember why. In fact, I barely remember what happened in the first season beyond Hachiman joining a club with two troubled girls named Yui and Yukino who may or may not have a crush on him, and helping people out in his own cynical self-defeating way. I remember the visual design being kinda meh because Brains Base hasn’t done a good job at offering anything more than stale colors for years, but they were still a better alternative than feel’s usual output. So discovering that the animation and direction in this season actually put Sankarea’s Shaft-like surprise presentation to shame was more of a pleasant surprise than Nintendo finally releasing a new IP. Third-person shooter, you say? Wonder how long it’ll take for them to milk that into oblivion.

I do remember the first season feeling like a load of build-up for a climax we never got though. Things happened, but the only real contribution to the story was some characters going through minor realizations that they had yet to use. I’m fully aware that conclusions aren’t the final judgment of quality and that buildup is important too, but you’ve got to use that buildup for something or else you’d just be like the anime version of Destiny: always on grind. So does the second season of Yahari fix that? Sure...in some alternate universe where good anime is more plentiful.

The anime continues from the conclusion of the school festival arc in the first season when Hachiman is confronted about his self-defeating personality and how it can be really troublesome to people around him. But that doesn’t stop him from putting it to use in order to break up a confession surrounding one of his male companions and a girl he likes, which causes a rift to form between him and his fellow club members, who agree with him about as much as I agree with anybody who continues to deny the existence of global warming (how blind can you be to not notice our abnormal weather, you idiots?). This rift starts to grow wider when some girls from his middle school life, including one that he confessed to, show up around the same time a student council election occurs and the club is asked to help one of the students bail from it by nominating themselves. From there, Hachiman is put through the ringer regarding his own personal demons and if he can’t get past them, he’ll lose the few people in his life who actually do care for him.

A good drama in theory, but the show enters Spice and Wolf territory in that it has a weak base conflict and it doesn’t even really follow up on its potential. Imagine if you were watching a drama and the base conflict for much of the story was about some dude refusing to admit that he hated bananas. You may be thinking “wait, that sounds f*cking stupid”, and that’s what I said with the majority of the season minus the f-word. It was impossible for me to hold student council elections on the same level as the highschool version of Jesus’s sacrifice because A) it didn’t work when Degrassi* did it B) you can still hang out with each other and stuff if the club doesn’t exist anymore. There isn’t any sacrificing schoolwork and your future for the club with no guarantee that you’ll succeed. It’s just really personal conflicts that aren’t given enough grounding to make any sense, and it dragged out far longer than it should have.

I wouldn’t call the conflicts as bad as Spice and Wolf’s because there’s more to Oregairu that makes it one of the better LN adaptations than furthering relationships - or as much you can nail relationships in regards to LN-like characters. Unlike Lawrence, and Holo to a lesser extent, these characters have some ghosts in their life and the relationships are a means to exploring them, even if it still doesn’t do as much with them as it should have. One way to fix that would have been to reveal what Yukino’s problems actually are. Yeah, we know she’s bad at socializing, not helped by an annoying older sister who acts like a cocktease boyfriend stealer from a crappy doujin or an even crappier gross-out comedy, but the show is as fast to reveal useful information as video game companies are to release actual reasons to get hyped for their products. The name is there and it looks nice, but how about some actual gameplay, huh?

So there were multiple times when the show just kind of lost me, mired in the very idea of its self-loathing that it forgets to really develop it beyond its base premise and goes into Catching Fire-levels of “holding out but have faith in us” right down to having a very similar style of ending. And it annoyed me here just as much as it annoyed me in that movie, because it looked like it was finally going to get interesting regarding the relationships and inner-problems that the characters have been going through in its last two episodes. The characters make up and come to realizations about their current situation, but the future is still vague and you need to take more than the small steps you just went through in order to achieve real personal growth.

But nope, the show ends at what seemed like the middle of a story that has had too much devoted to its buildup and we’re not going to be getting another season anytime soon given how many of the light novels there are at the time this review goes out. It frustrates me to no end to see what anime could have been, only to come off as unfinished. Maybe you could say that the realization that the characters love their life and their friends and are even capable of romance is enough for you, but that feels kinda weak to me. There are plenty of shows on the Disney Channel that say the same thing, and being better executed isn’t enough to really make Oregairu any different from them. Sure I wouldn’t have been comfortable with sitting through love triangle drama, especially if it involves a man named Armani, but sometimes you’ve just got to rip off that bandage rather than peel it slowly and prolong the pain by 10x the amount it would have taken otherwise.

*I never actually watched Degrassi so I don’t know if it overdramatized student council stuff, but it wouldn’t surprise me either way given how much else it overdramatizes.

Wow! What a total let down this second season of SNAFU is!

I moderately enjoyed the first season due to its many genuinely funny moments involving amusing characters like Hiratsuka, Totsuka and Zaimokuza. While completely devoid of romance, at least that season lived up to the "comedy" in the title of the show. Hikigaya, the lead character, is a refreshingly bitter loner whose observations most people can relate to. The bleakness of his worldview is amusingly contrasted with some very silly situational comedy. Personally I find the funniest character to be Hiratsuka, the home room teacher and club counselor who throws a mean punch, but ... can't seem to land a husband.

The second season has been absolutely dreadful though. Gone is all the comedy from season one. Gone is the silliness of the supporting characters, many of whom hardly even make an appearance. It's like an entirely different show. Where it was once a relatively lighthearted and amusing watch, it's now a slow-paced drag with endless vague blabbing about things that largely go unmentioned and unspecified. It practically grinds to a halt mid-season when we're suddenly supposed to care about a new character and endless meetings about some pointless Christmas show they're putting up with another school.

This is like a crash course in bad writing. Characters reacting to things that are left unsaid. Lots and lots of pseudo-philosophical nonsense and observations that don't match what we actually see on screen. Reactions and character motivations that make zero sense and seem to come out of the blue. Conflicts that are never properly explained or resolved. Throughout most of the second season, Hikigaya and Yukinoshita are apparently having a falling out, but only God knows why. The writers don't bother explaining it, but it serves as the dramatic focal point of their relationship regardless. Now that I've watched the whole thing, I'm honestly not sure why I didn't drop it all mid-season.

It's an agonizing and depressing slog to sit through, but hey if you enjoy watching hours of emotionally crippled characters not being able to communicate with each other and yet having seemingly profound experiences without ever really involving the viewer into the why and how and what and where and when of it all, this is the show for you. There's no romance and no comedy though, so if there was an award for most misleading title, this would surely win it.

I'm not going to spoil anything, except to warn potential new viewers that the ending is unresolved and unsatisfying and makes you curse yourself for wasting so much time on the 13 excruciatingly boring episodes of this frustratingly terrible season.