Comparing to your standard Harem/Sci-Fi/Action/Love Comedy/Comedy /Youth Drama shows, you have the biggest freak show in town.
The show "My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU" could be simply put as a nerd called Hikigaya desperately trying to avoid making friends. For some unknown reasons or even past histories that I still don't understand/get it, he is desperately trying to OBJECT the idea of having friends or joining a club. He might have a better life if he would just act and join a random club and showed up once in a while, He refuses to.
He is not rejected by the society. It is just himself quitting the crowd. Like what I did.
You've also got a girl called Yukinoshita. There are almost too many "TOO" to describe this girl: she is too good at her studies; too honest when she speaks; too stupid to speak so blunt; too strong that doesn’t even need to rely on the others; and probably too good to be true. And I too, had such "friend" surrounding me. He is my English literature teacher. A good friend of mine, an ass at times.
The second girl called Yui also applies with a few "too". Quote from Frank Ocean, "Too many white lies and white lines". She is too weak. Too good of a girl. One thing that she is not "TOO" is her social skills. Just the right fit to survive.
I don't know who she is at my life. Hell knows.
You've also got a Chuunibyou Otaku called Yoshiteru. He, like many, is fascinated with the idea of writing light novels. He had a dream. A Dream of becoming the top selling light novel writer in Japan. The thing he doesn't know is that he could not write: his writings are sloppy and full of grammatical mistakes. But well, who cares?
to surprise you, this is not a slice-of-life show.
You never had a otaku friend that would write like this and still doesn't get his, or her literature/language teacher beating him up; You never will find anyone as useless as Hikigaya to win a tennis match against the Ace of tennis club; You might heard some, but you might never find anyone struggling with their tutorial fees, (or you might not even found one in the US, but it is something easy to found in Hong Kong). And you might probably be able to find anyone as stupid as Hikigaya trying to avoid a relationship. You might never find a woman trying to seek advice from a man on how to bake cookies (Instead of searching YouTube) that is trying to please a guy - usually man does that.
At times, this is not a slice-of-life show. While the solutions are raised, problems are not instantly solved (like the scholarship case), but they move on. The show does a good job of discovering solutions, not at actually helping to solve them. Scholarship case was one of the more abrupt endings of the show: the idea of Scholarship was raised, but the difficulties of getting a scholarship were ignored. It was, at times, making me feeling incomplete and quite empty.
At times, the show does feel shallow, sometimes circling around. There is an excessive amount of irrelevant scenes, such as maid café scenes. Shopping scenes. Useless talking scene. At times, it even attempts to preach: Episode 1’s did have a debate on the definition of youth and try. It is a good effort of including such ideas in an anime, but it is poorly presented in the dialogue form: there are many talks but no walks. It might be a right choice in a novel, but it would not apporiate for something like this to happen in an anime: Visual-wise, the animation at that time was considerablely boring, consisting only two guys speaking and switching position. Plus, It leaves the audience unsatisfied as they never do what they claimed they would do.
At times, freaks do shine. Hikigaya was the best character of all times: he is just like me and I hate myself. He's able to come up with some great solutions at times, like the tennis game. But he's trying very hard to do a useless escape. Stupidity has no boundaries, but I love him. At least I am not a good student as he does. Yoshiteru is a freak and he shines. Yukino was the genius of the group but she wasn’t the one to be shining. Freaks, Nerds, genius, or just even some normal person working for their love ones, deserves to have a chance to shine.
Freaks do deserve a chance to shine. So as the show.
6.5
