Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: The Masterfully Crafted Cringefest
Sakurasou is one of the most hyped romance anime series made in recent times. A lot of people think that it is one of the best shows ever made, and the amount of 10’s in the review section is overwhelming. However, while this show is certainly above average in several aspects, Sakurasou isn’t even close to being something which deserves all those Masterpiece-ratings, and for a variety of reasons, such as bad writing, shallow characters and cringe-inducing, awful drama, which completely stomped my happy thoughts about this show after the first cour.
Let’s start with some good things.
**START OF GOOD**
I see people praising this show’s art a lot, and it certainly is very good. I liked the character designs: the characters were distinguishable and pretty unique in their appearances and were drawn pretty nicely. The background were alright, the animation was fluid and crispy. JC Staff continues to impress me with their art.
The sound was decent, too. Nice OPs, nice EDs. It is nothing to write home about, but the soundtrack does its job well, it nicely accompanies the action on the screen. Nevertheless, it failed to impress me as a standalone piece of music, it’s not one of those OSTs which I can listen to without context.
**END OF GOOD**
Because of the next paragraphs I’m going to become hated by a lot of people, I’m sure.
The show serves nice as a comedy, however it fails in a category which is supposed to be main here - romance. Romance is one of the worst parts of this show: it’s unbelievable, it’s cringy, it’s just poorly written. It’s SO bad that you care about the romance of the side-characters more than about the mains'. And that’s not even the worst part about Sakurasou.
The author knows how to write decent comedies, but when he dwells into the drama category, he ultimately fails. I’m going to be honest with you and myself: I enjoyed the first half of Sakurasou. It is genuinely one of the funniest shows I’ve ever watched, and only because of it I can’t say that Sakurasou is plain bad. It shines in the beginning, only to be consumed by the black matter of unbelievably bad drama in the end.
The amount of melodrama is about the same as you would find in your typical show for teen girls. Something bad happens unexpectedly, which affects everyone, everything suddenly goes to ashes, the main characters decide to save something valuable for them, one of the characters makes a speech, everyone cries, mains win. And while sometimes it certainly works, unfortunately, Sakurasou itself fails to execute this trope somewhat originally. It just pulls this trick out of the blue and leaves you with a constant situation of you having a palm on your face. Furthermore, when the writer REALLY had a chance to execute a drama properly, he screws up again. Several times.
The characters are not THAT bad though, however they are zero-and-a-half-dimensional, especially mains. The protagonist-kun just screams «I’M AN AVERAGE JAPANESE STUDENT», the main girl is just meh as a whole, also we have an English bitch, a hikki, a gigolo, an alien girl and a light tsundere, who actually is the most entertaining character in the whole series. They aren’t that bad-written, but they are certainly nothing deep.
I tried to enjoy this show. I honestly tried. Yet, the lack of good writing and the bullshit drama ruined Sakurasou for me.
