Reviews

Oregairu, for a while anyway, was the darling of many a video essay dissecting something or other about the anime’s main character Hachiman, who many people find to be relatable, I guess, because, I don’t know, he’s cynical. It starts off as what seems to be a satire of a romantic comedy, which then turns into a sort of vague critique of youth and Japanese high-school society, before ending as a kind of tragedy. If this type of story progression makes no sense to you, its because it doesn’t make sense. The second season rolls around and the story’s about as aimless as ever until the introduction of Hachiman’s underclassman Iroha; from there, the story finally manages to assume some sort of identity as something you may see in the harem genre. A revolving door of love interests come and go Hachiman’s way and spend time with him one-on-one while the thin, bare excuse for a plot plods along: a story where nothing seems to happen and everything seems to take up far too much time. There is still a service club, they still apparently help people, but now it appears as though Yukino is against wanting to spend time with Hachiman. There’s something about co-dependency, but it is never outright explained why the relationship between Yui, Yukino and Hachiman is viewed in such a way, especially by someone like Yukino’s sister, who anyway, for an adult, is taking an unbelievable interest in the goings on of second year high-schoolers. I get that the threesome are all too awkward to outright express their feelings for one another, and that it’s trying to be subtle instead of outright explaining everything, but since the whole situation is so unrealistic it’s impossible to tell most of the time what is specifically being implied. I’m sure it’s not helped by the fact that the anime cuts out portions of the light novel, regardless, it’s a baffling amount of needless complexity that’s never really fully explained. This isn’t helped by the characters who are all also needlessly complicated and unnecessarily abrasive, and the situation certainly isn’t improved by the ending, which ties up no loose ends aside from who wins, something which was already apparent from the start.

So much of Oregairu is so muddled that’s its difficult to find a place to start. The plot, which was always non-existent, remains non-existent to the point of irrelevance, but then if I were asked to point out to you what is relevant in the show I’d have a hard time coming up with good examples without defaulting to Hachiman, but even with him, there doesn’t seem to be much going on. Hachiman is apparently looking for something genuine, but what this genuine thing is, even the author doesn’t know. I assume that the genuine thing is a genuine relationship or a genuine friendship, or something like that, but he was friends already with Yui and Yukino before, and remains friends with them after his speech, so it’s difficult to tell what exactly he means and how this differs from merely being in a romantic relationship with either Yui or Yukino. Yukino, the primary love interest, is curiously absent for a large majority of the story. What happens with her doesn’t ever seem to be very relevant unless it relates to Hachiman, and when she predictably wins against Yui, it happens without much effort on her part, despite Yukino doing almost nothing all season to win Hachiman’s affection. Apparently this has something to do with a Yui bias within the studio adapting the light novel to anime, with them choosing to include scenes with Hachiman and Yui rather than with Yukino. Supposedly, this is true, but I don’t really see it as a relevant criticism against the adaptation, since anyway, between the two, Yui always struck me as the better written character.

Wataru took his sweet time writing Oregairu and I don’t blame him. I had a hard enough time trying to finish watching something so boring, so I could only imagine how boring it was to write it. The story’s main issue is a lack of a driving force propelling events forward. There is nothing to latch onto: no direction forward towards a goal, and no direction home towards a satisfying ending. The lack of focus ends up making everything feel aimless. Events happen, but they don’t go anywhere. Storylines start and end, but they never connect to form a whole. Hachiman and Yukino fall in love, but despite everything they’ve been through, they could’ve just as easily have confessed their feelings in the first episode, considering their circumstances at the start and the circumstances at the end are more or less the same. Despite making friends with Yui, Yukino remains an outcast. Yui remains friends with both Yukino and Hachiman despite basically being rejected. You’d think surely, at least, Hachiman has changed, since people treat him kind of differently, and that his personality has sort of taken a turn for the better – and at the end, he rejects his essay, the introduction to the first episode of the first season, he rejects his belief that youth is a mistake – but there’s nothing else offered in return, there’s no counter-argument to all the things he’s said before, no alternative view-point. Hachiman’s assertions still stand, more or less, and he stands at the end with Yukino, despite never really changing, despite never really maturing, despite nothing ever happening at all.

I kind of just get the feeling that past a certain point there’s no one who actually likes the show and that everyone who says they like the show are just saying that because they want to believe it themselves, they want to like the show despite the show resisting any and all attempts at enjoyment. They want to like Oregairu because they see themselves in Hachiman, they think Wataru Watari is a guy just like them who has gone through the exact same experiences as them, has been maligned, bullied, neglected, so on and so forth, they’re looking to him for a solution, a resolution to their problems, closure of some sort. So in a way, though I don’t really care, it is sort of a shame that things end so tepidly, because if there was more of a solid conclusion I think it would’ve made a lot of fans happy. Obviously I was never one of them, not because, as I wrote earlier, that the author’s worldview is wrong-headed, it was always more so because it was written without a clear aim. The story is essentially entirely filler, stalling for time until the necessary events have supposedly taken place for something of true interest to occur, but what ends up happening is that the narrative ends up stalling forever, or what feels like forever, trapping the viewer in a sort of fictional purgatory, where they mistakenly assume that eventually something of interest will happen in the future, despite nothing of interest ever happening in the past. At one point I tried to remember why exactly I was here, watching an anime I had no interest in, watching a medium I’ve long grown tired of, when I realized that, much like Hachiman, I too, was searching for something genuine: a genuine waste of time.