Horimiya Review

Perception vs Reality. It is something that we deal with on a daily basis. When you wrap all of that around a wholesome love story, what you end up with is a potential recipe for success. Hori-san to Miyamura-san (Horimiya) encapsulated that very notion; however, did the perception of using said notion create a reality that was enjoyable?

Let’s go!

The Story

Miyamura is a boy who has many insecurities due to a past where he was relentlessly bullied and didn’t have many friends. Because as such, he was the quiet kid in the class, just sitting there paying attention to the teacher and heading straight home after everything was said and done. Many people thought of him as invisible and, perhaps, that’s just the way he liked it.

One day, Hori’s little brother Souta fell and hurt himself. A rather punk-looking boy helps him back home but beneath all of the piercings and tattoos lies the boy that Hori recognizes… it’s Miyamura! Here, the two of them begin a conversation about hiding their true selves while they are at school. Miyamura chose a path of self-expression; however, if the school were to find out some of the things that he had done to his body, it could cause a lot of trouble so he opted to hide them and take on this silent “wallflower” persona.

Hori, on the other hand, seems all nice and polite at school; however, she is a bit of a short-tempered tomboy who plays the mother role for Souta since her real mom is always away on business as is her father Kyousuke. This forced Hori to grow up sooner than she would have liked; however, she wanted to hide all of those responsibilities from her friends at school.

Because they had that common thread of living a different life, the two of them hit it off. Even though you would think that the two of them would help each other change, Miyamura was the one who really needed the development. Slowly, but surely, Miyamura changed into a completely different person because of Hori and the two of them ended up dating each other. Once over that hump, Miyamura began to gain friends and experience a life that he never thought was possible.

The Characters

Izumi Miyamura

I really loved Miyamura as a main character. While he was meek and timid, he wasn’t exactly one of those scaredy cat pushover characters you usually see. He never really tried to avoid a situation entirely but he was more passive about things than you would think. While he never really grew that definitive backbone, you could definitely tell that there was some sort of transformation going on with him. You saw the layers of insecurity and privacy peel away one-by-one until what was left was a pretty decent and respectable person.

Kyouko Hori

As much as I loved Miyamura, I loved Hori just as much. Tomboy characters are always one of my favorite archetypes and Hori did a great job in that role. In the back half of the series, there were moments were people from Miyamura’s past resurfaced and those memories began to haunt him… that is until Hori stepped in and handled business. Hori is definitely not afraid to ger her knuckles bloodied… especially if it involves defending Miyamura.

Being brash is just but one side of Hori. She also has a very sweet and tender side to her which you can help but drool over. And then there’s that masochistic side of her that nobody saw coming! The fact that she actually wanted Miyamura to yell (and possibly hit) her was a bit surprising but I guess is added to her character and to the level of comedy that this series carried with it.

Tooru Ishikawa

He starts off by having a crush on Hori but when he finds out that Miyamura also likes her (and starts dating her), you’d think that he would become the antagonist of the series. Instead, he ends up befriending Miyamura; however, that didn’t really come easily. Tooru had a bit of a grudge and the two of them even physically went at it! Once they worked it all out of their system, though, things settled down and the two of them became really good friends.

Outside of that initial dynamic, there really wasn’t much to Tooru. It is one of the issues I had with the series with the side characters just falling into the background once their uniqueness wore off (which happens a bit too often)

Remi Ayasaki

Small, full of fire, and energetic as heck. She’s also a member of the student council… at least on the surface. You wouldn’t be able to tell based on how little work she does. In fact, there was an incident between her and Hori near the beginning of the series that really painted Remi in a negative light. That all disappears once the situation clears up and she becomes just another background character. Aside from her character design, I didn’t really find much to like about Remi. I found her a bit annoying more than anything.

Sakura Kouno

She is the vice president of the student council and gets a pretty interesting story… until she just floats into the background. She had a crush on Tooru but, due to a misunderstanding, she thought that Tooru was daring Yuki. She worked up a lot of courage in order to confess to him but, in the end, she gets rejected. At that point, you’ve grown attached to her as a character and you really feel sorry for her but the show just kind of forgets that story arc happens and she becomes just another secondary character. While I am making this complaint a lot… I do realize that we only had 13 episodes to work with here so there is some forgiveness to be had given the size of the roster.

Kakeru Sengoku

He’s the student council president and Remi’s boyfriend. He’s highly intelligent but he has a dirty little secret that could ruin him if everyone found out… that he was bullied by Hori when they were kids! Another character that is just “there” even with the hilarious past.

Iura Shou

A side character that DIDN’T fade into the background that remained pretty interesting… mainly because of his dual personality. When he’s at school and around others, he is very loud, energetic, a bit air-headed, and quite obnoxious. Some people can’t even stand his personality; however, once he gets home, the personality takes a complete 180. When he’s around his little sister, Motoko, he’s very monotone, serious, and direct. Motoko has an issue with her grades. No matter how hard she studies, her grades continue to slip and it’s frustrating her. Iura ends up being that voice of reason and source of encouragement for her. Even in the final episode, you see both personalities side-by-side and it even made Motoko wonder if Iura was the same person. Out of all of the side characters, he was my favorite.

Yuki Yoshikawa

Yuki is a friend and classmate of Hori’s. The biggest angle about her character is that she tends to hide her feelings from other people. This has come back to bite her in the ass several times but there are moments where she does experience a breakthrough. She has a certain level of insecurity about her which would make you think that it would allow you to find her adorable but, in reality, you kind of just want to scream at her to open up and stop keeping everything to herself.

Honoka Sawada

Outside of some comic relief, I cannot understand the reason why this character exists. Thought to have been a stalker of Miyamura’s, turns out she’s a lesbian and has the hots for Hori. She became a short-lived love rival for Miyamura which made zero sense because Miyamura and Hori were already dating at this time and were actually pretty serious about each other. There was no reason for this character to exist at all but, yet, here she is. I can sum her up in two words:

Little shit.

Art, Animation, and Sound

As far as slice-of-life anime go, the art and animation were pretty average. If you’ve seen one teen anime in a school setting, you’ve seen them all and Horimiya was no different. The character art was a bit of a cross between shounen and senin which was kind of cool. You had characters like Remi who looked as if they could have come from a shounen series while everyone else had that mature vibe going for them… except for Miyamura which looked senin with his long hair and then looked shounen when he cut it.

Outside of the opening and ending, the soundtrack didn’t really stick out all that much but, like most SOL shows, it didn’t need to. In a show such as this, the soundtrack only exists to enhance the scene and the mood rather than give you some memorable Sawano drops. Here, it did its job but it’s not something I’m going to rush out to get.

Overall Thoughts

If I were to be honest, this is a great example of an anime that starts off hot and heavy and then just finishes with a bit of a whimper. I think that Hori and Miyamura got together way too soon and when they realized that they had run out of content, they began to focus on the secondary characters more than the main characters. Normally, this is fine in most series but when you save all of those side stories for the back half of a 13-episode series, it feels as if you’re just rushing to get through everything before you have to put the attention back on your main characters to wrap things up.

This also gave birth to the other issue I had with characters getting a moment in the spotlight only to be placed into the background. Plus, I didn’t start watching this show for the side characters. With the premise and the type of set up this show kicked off with, I was invested in Hori and Miyamura. I couldn’t have cared less about anyone else and when those side characters took time away from the two characters I was invested in, it made it a difficult show to watch.

That’s kind of sad because I started off watching this show the moment it dropped each and every Saturday. Towards the end, I found myself scrubbing through the episode just to see when we could get back to Miyamura and Hori’s relationship. The fact that I was able to do that on a couple of episodes and not miss anything important is quite puzzling.

I believe that by introducing a massive cast for a small-scope project also hurt the overall quality. Of course, don’t mince my words and think I hated this show. I enjoyed it… it was quite good… but I only cared about two characters and I felt that they rushed their development, stopped caring about them to get everyone else in, and then went back to them to close out the show. It was a weird formula that took the wind out of my sails for this one. I just wished it was left on Miyamura and Hori some more. I wished there was more drama between them. I wished that the show would have ended with them getting together and that they spent the rest of the series helping each other to find their true selves.

That would have been a much better story, in my opinion, but what started out as something unique quickly degenerated into another standard SOL romcom.