Reviews

Horimiya is an anmie I definitely enjoyed watching. At first I thought it was a really typical romance anime that would not make me feel a thing. Little did I know , after the first 3 episodes I immediately said to myself "This anime has an enormous amount of potential and it might become my favourite one". I was so happy when I started the show , since I saw something in it. I liked the story , which honestly isn't THAT good , but as long as I enjoyed listening to it and watching it , I'm fine with that. So as I continued watching the anime , I noticed that things were getting a bit too fast paced for my taste. The relationships happened too fast , yet they had little to no progress at all. I was expecting some kind of character development from the characters and that is what we see in Miyamura (the main character) when he starts socializing with other people from his class. After he got into a relationship with Hori , he was criticized because of his outside appearance. Although Hori didn't mind his outside appearance , and we do know that this is what Miyamura likes about Hori , in later episodes he cuts his hair off , he stopped wearing piercings and whatnot. I was honestly disappointed. He acknowledges the fact that Hori does not judge by appearance and he could stay the way he wanted to , yet he cuts his hair instead not accepting himself. I am not sure if that decision made by Miyamura is intended to be looked as a flaw of his character "He doesn't accept himself the way he is , so he cuts his hair" , but I personally see that as self inflicted damage on the anime. The essence of the relationship in this anime is loving DESPITE the difference , not BECAUSE of X , Y , Z. With this "character progression" everything seems to be for naught. From then on I felt like the anime was getting lazy in making it good quality and I was slowly starting to dislike it. At around episode 8 , I was seriously considering dropping it , but I had this glimpse of hope that if the end is good I would give this anime a higher rating , but oh boy was I disappointed. To be honest , I expected a typical cliche drama love triangle end of the anime , or some kind of serious fight between the main characters that leads to a break up or something close to it , and although it is cliche , I love this type of stuff. I love seeing the characters fall into deep thoughts because of the situation they are in. We don't get to see that side of the characters. It sounds stupid , but the end is boring because it tries to teach you something and it wants to be unique and that's what makes the end boring. If I had to change something about the anime , it would be the focus on the backstory of Miyamura. We get to know that he was being bullied from his middle and elementary school days , we get nothing else. The only one who knows about it is Hori and she doesn't make too much of a deal of it. There's this one episodes where she steps up for him and that's it. I wish the anime was longer , with this much potential , if it was around 24 episodes it would have been one of the best romance anime this season , or even this year. Overall , i enjoyed half of the anime , the other half I watched for the sake of watching it to the end.