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WataMote is one of the biggest surprises for me and I regret I did not watch it ten years ago when it came out.

If you've been watching anime for any period of time, you have probably already heard about it. Our main character, Tomoko, had since long become a meme and a caricature of a female shut-in with her baggy eyes and disheveled hair that had never felt the touch of a brush. She plays otome games, she listens to Yandere BF ASMR, she fights with her family and she does not have any friends at school. "She's just like me" is what you're expected ... to think.

What makes WataMote truly great is how gruesomely real it is. While the show frames itself as a lighthearted SOL comedy with many references to SOL titans such as Haruhi and K-On, in most cases Tomoko's blunders make you pity her, rather than laugh at her. Her social anxiety is made palpable through audiovisual hints, changes of art style for a moment, sudden changes in ambient noise from soundtrack to the hum of the street. She sweats and blushes and cannot speak loudly enough for most people to hear, forcing them to repeat their questions while she stumbles out a "Hai" that is not even picked up by the subtitles. In many of the less positive reviews I see people saying how uncomfortable they felt, a lot of the MC's feelings and situations painfully familiar to them. It is a testament to the incredibly realistic portrayal of what neurodivergent people struggle with in real life. And when Tomoko breaks down crying in her room once again, thinking to herself "I want to be normal", it is hard not to feel sympathetic to her.

This is a show that does not pretend to be a serious exploration of social anxiety, and yet it is. For something so whimsical to be so wonderfully grounded is mastery, and deserves all the praise that it got over the years.

Dedo Dedo Dede Dede... One hell of a name, isn't it?

This show is a lot of things, it is so many things that the most elaborate review of it on this website is incredibly long. But in short; it is cute (almost chibi) girls living their cute slice of life lives juxtaposed against a gritty, realistic first contact scenario in which everything goes wrong.

It is this contrast that I found surprisingly real. Life changes incredibly slowly, it takes years for one to notice but it's always dynamic. One day, aliens arrive. Three years later, people who were 14 when the massive mothership appeared over Tokyo ... are graduating high school, enrolling in college, looking for jobs and getting into relationships. But the UFO is still there, seemingly unchanged, part of the scenery, almost. All the while the country slowly shifts into militarism, the more radical members of society begin forming groups of opposing views, tension grows and people die.

Another thing that was a very pleasant surprise to me is how modern it is. Anime tends to be old-fashioned, eschewing phones as devices to call or text others and that's it. Here you have the girls play first-person shooter games, browse SNS, one of the characters makes a living through the internet, an AI is present who's largely reminiscent of modern language models rather than the classic sci-fi 'basically a human with a voicebox'. This is perhaps the first SOL anime I have seen that made me feel like it's actually set in the year I'm watching it in (in more ways than one).

I can barely withhold a real life comparison that is relevant to the current situation in the world (at the time of writing this review), but I feel like it is no place to bring up politics. Even if that would help explain why I feel the way I do about this anime. It is one of best releases of 2024 that you will never hear about.

PS. Unlike many others, I will say that the ending impressed me greatly, it is both unexpected and draws a fine line under everything that happened. I would call it most literally, a wrap-up.
PPS. Don't make the Haruhi mistake, watch it in the broadcast order, episode 0 is there for a reason.

"I'm still young, hopelessly stupid, and easily excited." - a typical highschool shithead.

Do you remember being sixteen? Breaking someone's heart for the first time? Having your heart broken, maybe? Making out with a stranger drunk in a dark back alley? Maybe you've cheated, maybe you were cheated on, had your promiscuous episodes that perhaps never ended. This is what this anime is about, it's about experiencing what feels like 'grown-up' romance for the first time.

Kuzu no Honkai is by no means an easy watch, it's not 'enjoyable' in the literal sense of the word, but you will enjoy it if you like stories that don't ... go easy on the audience. It's a highschool romance through and through, most characters are stupid kids who think they're adults because they tongue kiss each other and have sex, most of them are annoying, but weren't you the same when you were sixteen? Personally, it reminded me a lot of my highschool years, which is not something to be proud of.

In the end, it's a coming of age story with a happy ending (but not the kind you'd expect) and surprising amounts of yuri (for a show that is, in fact, not about exploring your sexual identity or a lesbian awakening of any sort). There is some comic relief sprinkled here and there, but it's so few and far between that you honestly appreciate it relieving the tension.

Overall, this is a must watch for anyone who enjoys romance anime and is tired of the usual 'handholding is lewd' narrative, this is modern highschool romance laid bare: selfish, disgusting and dirty.

Is it worth a watch? Definitely. Is it good? Maybe.

This is one of those shows that start off strong and then fail to keep up along the way. Frankly, it's a mix of brilliant episodes and episodes that waste your time. In the middle of its runtime you will see actual filler episodes that do not connect to the main story in anything other than featuring Shounen Bat, the poster boy of the show, one of those episodes is even openly framed as a collection of fictitious rumors that bear no resemblance to reality. Personally, I do not feel that a 13 episode show ... can afford to pad its numbers with filler in good conscience, but you may have a different opinion.

Looking at the plot itself, it's unsatisfactory at best. It ends up feeling as if the entire journey between episodes 1 and 13 focused on all the wrong things. Sure, it was supposed to be misleading at many points, but in the very end the show only confused itself. What it identifies as its main antagonistic forces ends up being superficially inflated. Suddenly, it's everybody's problem when there is nothing to actually support it being so.

Reading this over, it feels like a 'Not Recommended' review, but I leave it at 'Mixed' because the good parts of this series indeed rattle your brain and are very enjoyable, the art is pleasant and the opening is top-notch.
Go for this if you think you like weird anime. Or don't, because it's not going to be weird enough and you're not going to lose too much.