If you aren't developmentally stunted, watching SoL anime about kids (and probably for kids) becomes an entirely different experience from your twenties and onwards. A lot of anime is, unfortunately, teenage-boy-fantasy-projection garbage which I cannot fathom at all, certainly not anymore. Instead this is a kind of vicarious parental fantasy for me. I'm looking at these children interact in wholesome ways and it makes me want to root for them. I rejoice when they conquer these caricaturized childhood melodramas we are familiar with, because when we were children these melodramas were anything but 'melo'.
Some people tend to focus too much on whether a story is realistic or has realistic characters. I was one of those people at some point, but one must be able to recognize the value of simplification, caricatures, pastiches and the like. It must be emphasized that the characters and scenes in this anime are anything but realistic but have intrinsic value as caricatures because it makes them more easily relatable. Give this series a try, but only if you can get over the blatant lack of realism.
