1) A huge fanbase that I'm terrified to disagree with on anything
2) A romantic comedy for fear that it will focus too much on one aspect over the other and make the show boring
or 3) A show with more than 1 season, because there's always a chance the following season won't live up to the previous one.
So going into Oregairu or SNAFU or whatever you want to call it, I was terrified. I had heard amazing things about the show from its fans. I knew it was a romantic comedy cuz, duh, the name. And I knew it had a fairly recent second season released. Luckily I came out of the experience mostly unscathed, the few times where I wanted to die mostly being from the emotional moments of the latter first season and entire second season. While I think the Brain's Base season was slightly better in its approach at this show, the Studio Feel season also had a lot going for it. So I'm glad to say that watching this show was totally worth the fear I had going in.
I think I immediately was drawn to the show because of the idea of the main character. Hachiman is a loner. Like, a HUGE loner, to the point where he essentially mocks people for living their lives, though he doesn't say such things out loud. Anyway, I too connect with the loner persona, though not nearly to as much of an extreme as Hachiman. But the idea of a loner being put in a romantic situation and dealing with that, THAT was the thing that hooked my attention. The other great thing is that it's not even much of a romantic situation to begin with. Hachiman is forced by his teacher to join the Volunteer Service Club, who only has one other member (at first). Yukinoshita Yukino, much like Hachiman, is a huge loner, so it seems to be a match made in heaven. That is until you consider how much dislike she has for the main character right away, combined with the introduction of Yui, the bubbly 3rd member who seems way more interested and likely to date the protagonist by the end of season 1. Getting to the plot, basically it's a slice-of-life where students and teachers alike come to the club to ask for advice or assistance and the club then provides. It's a standard formula to say the least, but I didn't mind because it worked. And instead of every episode or mini-arc being resolved with some stupid "the real key was friendship" crap, the ways that the club arrives at its solutions to people's problems are well though out and work very well.
So the club member are Hachiman, Yukino, and Yui. Again, the first two are loners, with the latter being the perfect student who people hate for being perfect and the prior being a nobody, and Yui is the cheery one that lightens the tension between the other two 'unique' club members.
But I don't care about the main characters this time around. Hachiman's views are really interesting and something I haven't really seen before and they're cool, and the main characters as a whole are developed phenomenally. But I LOVE the side characters in this show, mainly for one reason:
THEY ALL GET SCREEN TIME.
I'm so tired of shows introducing a character and then shoving them aside for a key plot point 5 episodes later. SNAFU introduces characters and they're there almost every episode and I LOVE IT FOR DOING THIS. The friendly, pretty boy Hayato, the Skater boy Tobe, the VERY feminine boy Saika, the hardcore geek/otaku Zaimokuza...really the list goes on, and these characters all get screen time, are all important, and are all very fun and memorable.
Animation is hard to talk about with any show that switches studios between season. Brain's Base is my favorite animation studio. I love Durarara!! and D-Frag! and Baccano! (these guys really have a thing for exclamation marks) and I really liked how the first season looked. The first season doesn't dwell on romance nearly as much as the second, so the more loose style of Brain's Base fit the show very well for that part. When it switches over to Studio Feel in season 2, things look a lot more moody, more realistic, more bloom-y (seriously, so much bloom lighting) to connect with the more emotional tone of season 2, and yet they manage to maintain the core look that Brain's Base developed. It is a weird switch, especially for Hachiman who looks both barely and drastically different at the same time, but it's manageable and it works.
The sound is....'aight. There's nothing truly spectacular in this show that caught my ear. The openings and endings were all really nice, but again, nothing too outstanding.
My biggest issue with this show is the change from season 1 to season 2. Let me preface this by saying that both seasons are fantastic, season 1 being my preferred. In order to progress the love story that the title promises, I realize some things had to change. But where the first season gave us a bunch of new characters and many different tasks for the club to do, there was just one main new character who showed up repeatedly and the shows was far more focused on the angst and relationships between the three main characters. Again, it's not bad by any means, but it's a shift that's big enough to notice that I didn't like it as much as what the show started out with. It almost felt like it devolved into a romance story rather than grew to become one. Either way, amazing show.
Positives:
+Decent openings and ending themes
+OMG THE SIDE CHARACTERS
+Animation (particularly Brain's Base's, but that's just my opinion)
+A well-done shift between first and second season
+Hachiman's ideals and thoughts are different and thought-provoking
Negatives:
-The switch in seasons wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped for, but they did their best given what they had
-Plot was fairly standard, though executed decently
-Really cliffhanger-y ending. PLEASE stop trying to force me to read the manga, Anime
SNAFU is a romantic comedy as the name implies, with the first season taking up most of the comedy and the second being more focused on romance. Each season has its merits and drawbacks, but altogether, it forms one coherent, beautiful show that I really enjoyed, as I'm sure any slice-of-life fan would.
