anime

I finished it today and well... it's gone straight to my favorites' list.

The show is the inventor of a dozen of different tropes, as well as a whole genre, and does them better than most other inspired by it. I love how the characters are surprisingly not mono-dimensional.

Ayumu Kasuga is the weird anime character, but is not reduced to that role - loyal friend, her comments are to some degree "huh, that is a good question!", is a poor but not awful student and (as evidenced by a comment in E25) apparently keeps up with politics for example. Even though you know she is likely to do poorly in many things, there is no guarantee of it. Thus, you root for her even as she fails the bread eating contest. She's also relatable in the weirdest ways possible.

The rest of the cast reaches lower highs of complexity, but Ms. Sakaki's and Kaorin's arcs are both incredibly simple, yet make you want to root for them.

In many other shows, I feel some of the archetypes would often be merged together into one - a mixture of Tomo and Kagura for example. Or, not bother with the passage of time. Sure, the high school bliss fantasy is something many Japanese people apparently yearn for, considering the popularity of such settings and viewer demographics, but the ending works well because of that. You know the wacky adventures can't last forever or are in a vacuum - they started and have ended on time.

Either way, it's definitely a good watch and one of the more fun anime shows I've seen in a while.