And suddenly summer has left for a land far away, leaving me with only rain and cold for company. Thankfully, anime never leaves!
Joke aside, today’s anime is called Yahari Ore no Seishun love comedy wa machigatteiru. I know that title is just impossible to remember so let’s just go with Oregairu. It is the story of a young boy called Hikigaya, who just cannot deal with people so he is sent to the volunteer club by his teacher. In this club he meets Yukinoshita and these two young souls are forced to deal with each other and solve other students’ various problems.
At first it sounded like nothing special, I was mostly attracted to the title to be honest, since weird titles usually hide weird series, and I was right. I was hooked as soon as the first half of the first episode.
It really is nothing special, it’s just an anime about young students who have troubles dealing with life at their school because they are a little weird. It could have become a show about bullying, and it did deal with bullying at some point, but it was more than that.
The plot was beyond simple, with each episode or series of episode, our wonderful heroes of the volunteer club were trying to solve someone’s problem. It always went more or less smoothly and in the end it was always more or less Hikki solving the problem by himself. It really does not sound like anything special does it?
The fact that all the problems are ordinary is what makes the strength of the series. I said it dealt with bullying, I’m pretty sure everyone has somehow encountered bullying, one of the character suppress her personality to fit in, isn’t it something we all have seen as well? And let’s not forget the otaku character, for once not glorified in an anime. In the end, the plot of this series and its characters felt real to me, guess that’s why I liked it so much.
As for the characters themselves, as I said Hikki is a misanthrope. He feels like a low energy human being, only goes through school because he has to, feeling lonely but too proud to beg for companionship, not exactly fond of humanity either. You could ask why such a character is the hero of a high school series, but I have found to be able to relate to him more than I ever did to any other character before. Same goes for Yukinoshita.
She is smart but has an inferiority complex and cannot deal with people really well. She seems arrogant but she just is scared to mess up. Yui has a bright and cheerful personality but she chooses to tone it done to fit in with the other popular girls in her class.
These characters are people you can totally find in your high school (or in your high school memories), they act a bit more over the top than real people would but my point is, you can relate to them. Or they could remind you of someone you know. And they’re so endearing that you want to see them happy in school, happy in their own unusual way but happy anyway.
Despite dealing with I think are serious topics, Yahari was really fun to watch and I would not hesitate to recommend it to everyone!
