It starts out simple enough, there's a club about to be shut down due to lack of members. It's full of cute girls, one of whom explicitly says she's gonna miss doing nothing. On the other side, you've got the main character, a juvenile delinquent who's the leader of his own gang but is actually a softy and will absolutely do the right thing in a pinch. Heard all this before? Yeah, the show knows, you're not supposed to take it seriously, because the characters don't, the club president forgets the name of her club and the gang bemoan stereotyping and side characters comment on how unremarkable the main character Kazuma is.
The show is cliché, but it knows it's cliché and uses this to regularly make meta jokes, frequently in the form of Kazuma pointing out exactly what the audience is thinking when something ridiculous happens. An early example is when he gets in a fight with a girl who uses a cliché anime "special move" where she blinds her opponent by revealing a bunch of curtains that block out the lights and windows. This is really weird, actually, no, it's dumb. How did she set that up, did she know she'd be having a duel in that exact part of the hallway or are these curtains set up across the entire school? How did she trigger them to fall with a snap? That makes no sense. And wait a minute, they're just curtains, Kazuma can't see, but he can just run forward and push through them, this won't stop him at all. All these thoughts went through my head, and they probably went through Kazuma's too because he does exactly that, runs forward and pushes through the curtains...right through an open window. That's...smart, no, it's dumb, but clever. Really clever. D-Frag isn't cliché because it's not creative enough to come up with something original, it's cliché because it knows the inherent value of these cliché moments and what mentality it'll put the audience in. From there, it can play to or subvert your expectations at its leisure because it's honestly not trying to manipulate you, it's just genuinely trying to be a fun, likable show.
No scene demonstrates this better than the very next one after Kazuma falls out the window. Another cliché moment happens when Roka manages to catch him at the very last second and yells about never letting go no matter what. Kazuma then points out the absurdity of the moment, tells her to cut the moe act, and then suggests letting him go because he's not even that far off the ground so he'd probably be fine if he fell to which she responds that it's not an act, sure she's a little eccentric, but that's just who she is and she's not apologizing for it. The show isn't apologizing either, it's a cliché high school comedy and it owns that. That self awareness and unapologetic attitude lead to an amazing ride.
I barely scratched the surface of why this show is great, you can break down just about every scene just like this and see multiple layers of depth there, but basically, if you haven't watched this show, give it a try. Obviously it's not for everyone, no anime is, but it's criminally under appreciated and also has a great great GREAT dub if that's something you care about. On MAL it's got like a 7.6 which is insane, because I'd genuinely give it a 10/10, I unironically loved every second.
