Bunny girl senpai revolves around the mysterious condition known as “adolescence syndrome”, what is “adolescence syndrome” you may ask, well I would like to know to. What I think the author was going for was a criticism of Japanese culture of having to ‘read the air’ by making a character who can’t ‘read the air’ but no “adolescence syndrome” is instead used to conjure up magical scenarios with different girls so our protagonist can then save them and build up his harem in full light novel fashion. Speaking of characters let’s have a look at them.
Sakuta is a deadpan and cynical asshole who manages to look like a well written character by being a bit of a dick, there is no subtly or reason behind his actions he just is a sarcastic asshole for no reason yet all the girls love him. Sakuta is paired up Mai Sakurajima, the titular bunny girl which is essentially a female copy paste of Sakuta with the snark turned down a bit. This has cursed the show to have every line of dialogue (and there is a lot) to be cursed to not end unless there has been some sarcastic or vulgar remark, all delivered with the monotonousness of a text to speech generator.
Every arc follows the same boring formula, a girl has a supernatural problem, (which are all suspiciously similar to other anime arc’s) our protagonist ponders about it for a while and then ask the big boobed science girl who will then spout some quantum mechanics to fix the problem. You’d think this would give the show some much need complexity but no, the specific examples given are so tripe and overused that it becomes painfully obvious that the show is trying to look smart but just ends up falling flat on its face.
People often praise this show for themes, a person disappearing from your memories, bullying, anxiety, an eternal time-loop that repeats the same days and so on. Conceptually these might be interesting, but they are explored with all the depth of a puddle. Then when something anything with actual stakes is presented it just resolves itself after some exposition and moves on to the neatly move on to next arc and leave no lasting impact. Although here is one arc where our exposition machine is affected by “adolescence syndrome” and with no way to dumb exposition that the author found on the first 2 lines of Wikipedia? The answer is they don’t, it just kind of solves itself and leaves any relevant themes by the wayside. All in time to crash and burn at an overly melodramatic conclusion filled with lot of forced drama and lots of excessive crying.
Bunny girl senpai also suffers from light novel syndrome where it is just walls of text, normally this can be saved having interesting dialogue, or swapping dialogue for visual storytelling or even interesting direction to keep our interest up throughout the shows run time. What does bunny girl senpai do? Nothing, most episodes are characters talking to each other about the problems with some melodrama sprinkled in just to be repeated constantly throughout the shows run time.
Do you want interesting themes explored in a dialogue heavy show with many girls? Watch the monogatari series. Or how about a series with romance an apathetic protagonist? Watch oregairu. Do you want supernatural series with light romance? Watch kokoro connect. Or do you want to see some of this animes arc explored in a better show with a similar protagonist? Watch haruhi. There is nothing of value here.
