As a high schooler, Oregairu hits home as a message of overcoming your underlying personas and being (as Hachiman says) genuine to yourself. To understand more about what I mean, let us go back to the first season of Oregairu. The beginning of the anime introduces the idea of interactions of social groups. To be more specific, a lot of the anime focuses on how social groups usually try to avoid each other in order to not have unwanted attention with each other. The most common example of this can be seen many times in the anime where Hayata’s friend group is in one corner of the classroom while Hachiman sits in the corner alone. Hachiman considers himself to be an individual person because he thinks that many people put up fake personas of themselves and it’s better to be alone than with people who aren’t genuine and true with him. The idea of fake personas is very common in life, and in fact, many people usually do have one or two different personas depending on the people that they interact with. For example, you may act differently around strangers and acquaintances than say your friends and family. It is shown throughout the anime that Hachiman really wants to help people. However, Hachiman slowly comes to realize that upon helping people, he in turn hurts them himself. Therefore, Hachiman himself, creates a persona of him being uncaring and weird so that people don’t ask him for help. Once Hachiman is put into the service club, he starts helping others but in the process he goes to slowly start hurting himself until he realizes that he really wants a genuine relationship with other people. This idea of genuine relationships is the main focus of season 3 of Oregairu, and in turn, we start to learn more about the hidden motifs behind love.
One thing that the third season of Oregairu explored in much more depth is love. While the previous two seasons went more into social groups and standings, the third season started to delve deeper in what it means to love someone and how people around you will change as a consequence. In other words, it started to explore the deeper parts of genuity. The anime transverses from only focusing on Hachiman to going to a larger level. Yui, who I thought more as a supporting character than as a main character, gets introduced to become a much bigger character than previously expected. Her struggles and cries reveal the broader part of the main theme of the anime: to find something truly genuine. Everyone in the trio understands that their current relationship towards being oblivious to each other won’t work in the near future. This is introduced in episode 4 when Hachiman and Yui are walking back home and Hachiman admits that she wants to help Yukino with the prom because he promised to save her one day. Yui starts crying because she admits that she never really wanted anything genuine in the first place and Hachiman’s admittance causes Yui to tear up and cry because she starts to understand that she cannot have Hachiman only for herself. While Yui is a nice person, she is disingenuous like in this scene. This overall goes further into the fact that not all friends are what they seem. Yui is unable to give up on her persona of being a nice person who only cares about their friendship to truly showing her feelings. Although Yui doesn’t truly want something genuine, she still wants her friendship to be together. She comes to terms with this idea in the ending and decides to tell Hachiman and Yukino that she likes Hachiman dispelling her hidden feelings.
In my perspective, I found the anime to be much slower as compared to the previous seasons. This was added to the fact from things such as the rap battle and small cute moments which were sprinkled throughout the anime. These not only lighten up the mood of the anime but also provide support to the viewers to understand the current situation of the anime.
I also found the ending to be personally satisfactory. First, Hachiman’s confession to Yukino was an absolute masterpiece. Both people are socially awkward and couldn’t find the right words to properly say to each other. Hachiman couldn’t find the urge for himself to really tell Yukino that he loves her because he found it to be too embarrassing. This is why when Yukino told Hachiman that she loved him in the very end, it created a great both a slight sigh of relief that they were really going to say these words and as well a chuckle at the fact that it took so long for Yukino to say this. Although many people argue that the ending is too obvious, it was the best ending and the anime has hinted Yukino and Hachiman getting together several times throughout all three seasons. The scenes of Yukino and Hachiman actually having fun with each other was a hidden treat in the sense that the anime was finally able to reach the genuity that it was talking about from the very beginning. Yui coming to her own terms (as said before) and continuing the service club was something that I had not expected. However, this was a great addition to what was already done.
What I didn’t like about this series is about how overdramatized it is. To be more specific, I feel as though the idea of the prom and Yukino and Hachiman’s ideals are a little too overemphasized. Yukino doesn’t want Hachiman to help her with the prom because she herself wants to become more independent. And if she starts to rely more on Hachiman, she will regret herself for never being able to become more independent herself. Let us talk about how this is a slightly ridiculous idea. Managing a prom is a much more casual and less complex thing than what Yukino is portraying. Maybe the prom can become a step towards her becoming more individual, but the way the prom is portrayed in the anime makes it seem as if Yukino can prove her entire individuality to herself, her family, and her friends from this one task. This is definitely not realistic and in a way makes the anime less relatable to watch. Furthermore, many of the characters in Oregairu take what other people say too seriously. For example, Yui was almost left to tears when she heard that Haruno called their relationship fake and codependent. In most real life scenarios, this would never happen and most people would simply shrug off mean comments from people. Perhaps there is some realisticality due to the fact that Haruno is Yukino’s sister so what she says is perhaps related to what Yukino’s family believes about their relationship. Also, the fact that people are getting so down over this idea of codependency could be a way to show that Hachiman and Yui believe that what she is saying is somewhat true which can add to the thought of their relationship being shakier than expected. Overall, the anime had many unrealistic factors that made it less appreciable to watch.
In my eyes, I felt that the art and animation was very pleasant to watch. The colors were very nice in the way that it had the same tone throughout. What I mean is that all the colors blended in a way to have this cherry blossom aesthetic. The art and animation was definitely better as compared to the previous seasons so I am happy about that. I especially liked the art style they had in the crying scenes as you could really tell the water flowing down. In terms of fluidity, I thought it was pretty solid and I didn’t really detect anything abnormal throughout the anime. In terms of music, I found the OP to be very good and the art in the opening was great because it added to the symbolism of how the anime is focusing on Yukino this season. This is because, one, “yukino” in english means “snow” which is what the initial opening has throughout many of the clips. Furthermore, a lot of the OP focuses on Yukino herself and a lot of the song lyrics go to resemble that.
Overall, Oregairu, while having some slight problems, was a great anime that was mostly relatable and enjoyable to watch. 8/10
