It’s another slice-of-life romance in a high school setting, so of course, I’m going to give it a shot. This time around, we have Danjo no Yuujou wa Seiritsu suru? (Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive?). The premise, at least to me, sounded interesting as it tackled the age-old question of whether a boy and a girl can exist as nothing more than friends… with that anime twist, of course. Since I haven’t seen a lot of romances take this approach, I became curious. Did my curiosity pay off?
Let’s go!
First Episode Synopsis
We start off in middle school, and we are introduced to Yuu. He is part of the science club, but sells flower accessories on the side. His dream is to open a shop to sell them; however, his parents are against the idea. They tell him that if he can sell 100 accessories, they’ll consider it. In the club room, he meets Himari. She’s outgoing, energetic, and a major tomboy. For some reason, she became attached to Yuu’s accessories and thinks his dream is something worth pursuing. In fact, she tells him that she wants to help him achieve his dream. She helps him sell the remainder of his 100 accessories, and we get a time skip to high school.
Now with short hair, Himari cannot let go of Yuu. She hangs around him every day. She hangs around him so much that other students mistake them for dating, and some rumors start to spread; however, despite mentioning these rumors, they don’t really expand on them. One day, there is a girl walking toward some vending machines where Yuu is buying a drink. Despite the fact that she’s beautiful, she does nothing for him, but he likes the way she looks anyway. Something catches his eye, and he notices one of the original bracelets he made back in middle school. Suddenly, it breaks, but when he offers to fix it, she gets a bit mean, and he ends up running away.
Later, we are introduced to Shinji, a womanizer who briefly dated Himari in the past… along with five other girls at the same time. Despite them getting into an argument in front of Yuu, Shinji gets straight to the point and says that there was someone looking for him. It’s a girl named Enomoto, or more specifically, the one from the vending machine. She wants to take Yuu up on his offer to fix her bracelet. Turns out that Enomoto and Himari were friends from their childhood, and it seems as if Himari used to tease and torture her back then… and still does!
After the bracelet is fixed, Enomoto and Himari walk home together, but it starts to rain. They take cover under a bus stop where Enomoto confesses that someone confessed their feelings to her in the past, but she never knew who it was. She then says it was the maker of the flower accessories, Yuu. When Himari hears this, suddenly, her world changes as someone who doesn’t understand romance and only sees Yuu as a best friend might just realize that may not be true after all!
Worth Watching?
MAYBE – This one is a mixed bag. There are a few personal red flags for me. The first is that Himari is SUPER energetic to the point where she’s kind of annoying. Plus, this series also uses yelling and screaming as a form of humor; however, the silver lining is that it’s not the only form of humor they stick to. Since I have misophonia, all of the loud moments irritated me, but it wasn’t overbearing to where I needed to drop the show immediately. Personal issues aside, let’s call a spade a spade here and say that the show is fairly average at best.
Himari claims that she doesn’t understand love, but she also doesn’t understand boundaries. I’m all for tomboys, but not like this. She’s constantly hanging onto Yuu (literally), cracking jokes, making him feel uncomfortable, and doing everything that a girl with a crush on a guy would do, except she doesn’t understand romance. That is part of the humor, which is great, because she has no clue how what she could be doing could be perceived… until the show flat-out tells you that everyone around the school mistakes them as dating… and then the characters brush it off as if it doesn’t matter and nothing changes.
Going back to what I said about the show not expanding on the rumors, this is what I meant. Even Yuu is contradictory. Unless there was some sort of error in the translation, Yuu says that beautiful girls do nothing for me… then he immediately turns around and says that he likes the way Enomoto looks… and then at the end, Enomoto says that Yuu sent her a confession at some point in the past… but beautiful girls do nothing for him? Am I the only one confused by this? Perhaps there is another reason as to why he confessed, or maybe Enomoto was confused by the way he had previously worded something? I’m not sure, as that note was meant to be a cliffhanger to get you to watch the next episode, so no kind of light was shed on it, but the execution was rather odd.
Shinji is immediately an annoying character. The way he acts and speaks is meant to be humorous, but I can’t get into him. Then Enomoto herself has a Jekyll/Hyde complex where she’s sweet and shy one moment, and then brash and overbearing the next. The humor in her character is that she’s not aware that she’s being mean.
While I will give them credit for having some interesting character archetypes, I have to say that they are mixing like oil and water. For some reason, nothing seems cohesive from their personalities to some of the plot points. However, I gave it a MAYBE because there is potential here for this to get better. The obvious foreshadowing of Himari needing to realize she’s in love with Yuu, Enomoto also discovering it was Yuu (maybe) that asked her out, and their little rivalry over him while all Yuu wants to do is open his flower accessory shop could be an interesting premise.
I’ll give this the three-episode rule as should “Yuu” (see what I did there?), but if the first episodes were meant to give off good impressions, this one felt lukewarm… like there are better romances out there for you to choose from. It’s only this show’s potential that makes me curious enough to give it a chance.
