Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun is about a girl named Chiyo who tries to confess to her crush. He misunderstands her confession and decides to take her as his assistant, because, as it turns out, he is a romance manga author, and he seeks inspiration from the people he knows to create his characters.
At first, the show is alright at what it does, it's your average character-driven comedy. For the first few episodes, it introduces the characters and establishes their personality. It's nothing special, but it has potential.
These are the stock characters and their relationships from shoujo manga that are parodied:
1: Chiyo is the main girl who falls in love with the serious and mysterious main guy who is Nozaki. The latter is oblivious.
2: Mikoshiba is like the main girl from several shoujo romance manga that frequently stumbles on her own words and embarrasses herself in front of others, causing her to monologue wistfully about being an idiot. The joke is that, despite being a guy, he acts like a girl, therefore Nozaki writes him as a girl in his manga. Do you get it?
3: Hori is like the Tsundere girl who gets pissed at the handsome suave person who Kashima is. Basically, a gender-flipped Misaki and Usui from Maid-sama, minus the stalking and sexual harassment.
4: Wakamatsu is like the sweet, ever-forgiving girl who gets frustrated at the rude person who is Seo. He falls in love with Seo's voice, however, without realizing it's hers. Just like in superhero comics.
The show is meant to be a parody of shoujo romance manga, which is part of what got me interested in watching in the first place. I've read some of those, so I know what their usual flaws are: basic characterization, forced romance, lack of creativity in terms of premise, etc. If you've read one, you've read them all. So when I heard this was a parody of that, I was looking forward to it.
However, comedy anime is unfortunately not very good at remaining consistently funny, and often would rather remain repetitive rather than come up with something new or original. This is sadly the case with this show. It has the same problem as a lot of comedy anime seem to have these days, which I like to call "punchline decay": it sticks to a very rigid formula and gives the characters one or two personality traits, which I have previously mentioned, and bases all of its jokes around them. Nearly every joke that ever gets made in this show boils down to the same punchlines. They're not so much characters as much as they are running gags. But running gags require variations in order to stay fresh, which doesn't happen with the characters in this show. I certainly don't watch comedy shows expecting deep, three-dimensional characterization, but it gets stale quick if the characters have nothing more to them.
This is where my problem with it lies. Most of the parody just boils down to taking romance character stereotypes, changing the gender... and that's it. There isn't anything to the parody beyond that, especially pointless since the same characters or situations had already been gender-reversed or parodied in certain other series to begin with. More often than not, it plays out these situations without much in the way of irony to make a joke work. (I don't consider making a character type who is usually a girl into a boy to be ironic if it goes down that path too often.) Very rarely does the show ever actually do anything of actual substance with the parody aspect, which is a shame, since the show is at its best whenever it does that.
Similar to a harem anime, the only novelty in this comes from introducing new characters that fit into one character archetype, and once you already know what the joke will be with each character and it has already beaten their gimmicks into the ground, the show has nothing to offer. To put the character's lack of dynamism into perspective, half of the characters don't even have any personality of their own, and instead their personality is entirely dictated by their relation to another character. Chiyo's personality is dictated by her love of Nozaki, Wakamatsu's personality is dictated by his dislike of Seo, and Hori's personality is dictated by him beating up Kashima, etc. There isn't anything else to them really. I'm fine with background characters or supporting characters in comedies being one-dimensional, but not the main ones.
In regards to the romance manga parodies, it doesn't do a whole lot with it. It makes a few obvious jokes about that, like having sparkles or rose petals flying around the characters, and what it's like working as a mangaka. One example of such humor is a gag where three of the characters challenge each other to draw three assorted things. Two of them draw well, and the other draws poorly, except for the last one which they all draw poorly. Hilarious. I could never have seen that coming. The rest is your typical school comedy.
One of the points of a comedy is to subvert your expectations. Mikoshiba saying one of his dating sim lines and getting embarrassed afterward surely subverted my expectations the first time I saw it. Unfortunately, it didn't subvert them the fiftieth time nor the hundredth. It only subverted my expectations once for each of its characters, and then never again.
Basically, my criticism is that the show is cliché, in spite of meaning to poke fun at clichés. It's not bad for being conventional, but even if this were my first comedy anime, I still wouldn't like it that much due to its repetition. I'd still be thinking, "alright, I get it, this character has this trait to them. Are we getting to another joke soon?"
Admittedly, there were a couple of moments I thought were hilarious: Nozaki and Mikoshiba playing a dating sim in episode 4, and Nozaki having his characters stand on boxes to avoid misproportions when drawing in episode 8. I enjoyed these jokes because they showed unusual ways to deal with unexpected drawbacks in trying to draw or get inspiration for a story, which I found relatable. However, while these two scenes were funny, I didn't feel like it was worth watching the whole show just to laugh at only two scenes and be bored for the rest. I can't help but feel like even if I had dropped the show, I wouldn't have missed out on anything.
The show has a lot of good ideas, which could have ended up resulting in a genuinely clever show, but in my opinion, it never attempts to actually do anything with said potential nor does it take any risks, merely relying on the same 5 or 6 jokes and ends up a mediocre comedy, just as forgettable as the very same romance manga that it wants to parody. It's cute, but I tend to like shows when they have more substance than that. If there were more characters, there might be more different jokes based on how they interact with each other, but most of the humor revolves around their one personality trait regardless of who's interacting with who.
As much as I've been harping on the subject for the entire review, I don't want to make it sound like I believe that this show is any more repetitive than most other comedy anime, because it isn't. I only wrote this review because I watched this show at a time when I really became annoyed by this trend. If I had seen it at a different time, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. From recollection, most of any given episode takes place either at school or at Nozaki's apartment, and most episodes revolve around him trying to find ideas for his manga. Part of my apathetic opinion on it might be because I think I tend to like comedy anime better when there is a larger variety of situations that the characters find themselves in. I just feel like Nozaki-kun doesn't have enough variety in its humor to hold up for 12 episodes.
If you generally like comedy anime, then I'd recommend watching it and you'll probably enjoy it. This is by no means a terrible anime, even though I don't care for it. Otherwise, if you're like me and think a lot of comedy anime tends to miss the mark on humor, this likely won't do anything to change your mind. If you're looking for something more original in terms of characters and humor, you're better off looking for something else instead. There's certainly worse shows out there in regards to this, but there's also far better ones as well.
