First-person narrators are often unreliable narrators, and you can expect a person with extreme social anxiety like Bocchi to be about as unreliable as you can get, for when the behavior is so pronounced, there's a tendency to overthink about... well, everything, especially if it pertains to social interactions. It leads to a lot of mental stimulation that can be overwhelming, which is presented pretty well in the scene where Bocchi plays guitar and sings to memorize basic things most people would just remember without trying—or if they didn't, they wouldn't worry about it so much. There are a lot of aspects to the depiction of social anxiety that are pretty accurate, but it's often heavily exaggerated for comedy, and Bocchi has developed a number of eccentricities and general weirdness that goes beyond mere social anxiety, though these tendencies may have been cultivated due to her isolation. Like, the doggie role-play moment was a tad gross.
While comparisons to K-On! are common because BtR! has a similar skittles-colored high school girl moeblob quadruplet starting a band setup, the hyper-focused navel-gazey themes of self-improvement, and the social anxiety-based and self-deprecating comedy are far removed from the fluffy and light "I'm going to eat the last slice of cake and not get fat" tone of K-On!. However, the comparison is a little more serviceable if you lump in a little Tatami Galaxy for its milder anxieties, frequent first-person monologues, and imaginative segues. Just crank up the social anxiety to 11.
Everything begins and ends with Bocchi. It's all about Bocchi. Let's all love Bocchi! The other girls are a little thin in comparison and are mostly there to serve as fiddles and foils for Bocchi to bounce off of and to fulfill her need for friends. Most of what we learn about Bocchi is through her perception of the world or a visual gag—often imagined—and she accounts for most of the humor. Comedy may be subjective, but the nature of the humor here is highly repetitive, and while mining the many layers of social anxiety for humor is not uncommon in anime, I've rarely seen one milk the cow dry to this extent, leading to a few segments becoming predictable and flatter than Bocchi's face after that creepy sandpaper scene that I don't understand and want to forget. I'm often not convinced the timing is optimal at various points, but the series is decently humorous and more creative than most anime billed as comedy.
The greatest asset to the humor and what makes BtR! a lot better than it would otherwise be are the production values (reception to the manga has been more lukewarm from what I've seen) and the strong character acting. The latter is fine for most of the girls, with probably Nijika receiving some of the better moments, but the animators are quite a bit more inventive with how they handle Bocchi. She'll get more wobbly and moeblobby than usual and even turn into goop; she'll flop around on the ground like a fish, glitching-out to the point that the characters have to reboot her, and I wouldn't bat an eye if they used a windows reboot sound effect as a joke; she gets her face Mr. Potato-headed and molded into a cubist painting; there are also a lot of stylistic shifts during the daydreams and imaginative sequences, which will occasionally involve experimentation with different mediums, including painting, stop-motion figures, live action, and intentionally dated CGI segments; and so on. In recent memory this is one of the few mainstream anime series that has done anything similar, along with Mob Psycho 100. I need to be clear that I might not have finished the series if not for how well the animation complements everything, which already places this above most CGDCT anime in my mind. The creativity enhances the amusement of the scenes far beyond what I would have expected, even when I don't find it to be overly funny.
The other thing is how embarrassing—or cringe, as has often been said—a lot of the scenes are meant to be, which is a double-edged sword. Yes, you can have the characters behave in a way that is so disgustingly gross that even the viewers feel the need to take a shower and scrub until the skin is raw, and this factor can work for humor; or, as an alternative, the authors can present the character as inept, leaving room for self-improvement. Bocchi kind of grapples between the two. She makes a constant show of how much she values her friends, behaving in a ridiculous way that only someone who is naive and has thus far been fully deprived of friendship would behave.
The embarrassment I feel for Bocchi snowballs into absolute disgust on numerous occasions, and sometimes, it's just a bit much. Is Bocchi not only a rock, but did she also live under one? Does something ever become so exaggerated that it just feels forced? Episode 7 being a perfect example, as Bocchi really overdoes everything and has that dumb costume on, and these scenes drag on to no end with unadulterated slow-burn cringe. She truly soars through the heavens on a rollercoaster of cringe, and I can only hope her ride will terminate into a cannon, and she'll be shot into an active volcano (this is actually in the spirit of the show). It's not a very humorous episode, and it doesn't appear the intent was to promote character growth. The episode was not only cringe, but it was practically throw-away cringe. If you gaze for long into cringe, the cringe gazes also into you.
Most of Bocchi's character growth pertains to her becoming a bit more confident playing as part of a band, such as with episodes 6 and 8, leading up to a final performance with a larger audience—as is typical of these kind of stories. She'll improve little by little with other activities, but they keep it slow and with a number of "relapses." I find it hard to be anything but indifferent to Bocchi as a character, as I feel like her personality isn't a whole lot more than a hyper-condensed version of moe social anxiety—which would probably be fine, but we're forced to guzzle so much of it so fast and with so little deviation for 12 whole episodes that I feel like I'm as drunk on social anxiety as the series' alcoholic is on booze. The unique presentation of a very familiar subject makes this more compelling than most portrayals of social anxiety—probably also more charming, due to its visual humor, lighthearted nature, and moeblobber aesthetic, etc. However, in the end, it's just Bocchi taking another metaphorical step up her never-ending daydream staircase toward being a teensy bit more confident.
As for the music, I'll start with Ryou's bit to Bocchi on being yourself and not self-censoring with summertime happy-go-lucky lyrics, when that's not what represents you, and having the integrity to not sell out. Listen, you ice-cold weed wacker, you might have left your old band because they were too sell-out for you, but you're just a little less of a sell-out with your generic j-pop/rock guitar/drum/bass high school moeblob band, which we already have plenty of. Extreme conventionality aside, nothing about what Bocchi does in terms of music is a flaw of the series—other than... I suppose one could argue for Kita's speaking/singing voice being so different and possibly the recordings may not feel as natural or well-integrated as certain other music-based films or series, but there aren't any serious issues in this respect. Some of the songs are catchy, and a few EDs in particular have pretty nice synergy with the simple comic-like visual aesthetic they employ in those instances. The background tracks also fit the scenes well, and the chippy video game sounding one is memorable.
In the end, some of what I found to be not so appealing about Bocchi was in part what made it more watchable than most CGDCT anime: while BtR! was perhaps a bit narrow in focus as a comedic character study depicting social anxiety, the direction felt more purposive. Oddly, I get the same synthesization of style with the other CGDCT anime that aired this season: Do It Yourself!!, because while that series was also meant to be fun and lighthearted, there is a touch of thematic anxiety and a bit more of a guiding hand as well. There is something in the both of them that grounds either from being overly directionless, light, fluffy, and calorie-free as most CGDCT are, yet in totally different ways, and maybe that's a positive shape of CGDCT to come.
