This premier got overlooked over the weekend, but based on the ever-present image of the girl with the really big boobs wearing a T-shirt that says “really big” and the tidbits of early reviews I’ve managed to pick up via osmosis I can’t help but wonder if it was overlooked or “overlooked”.
It is an established scientific fact that the more obvious one makes it that they want to be left the hell alone, the more people will absolutely refuse to do that. As someone who is often the former and never the latter, I have no idea what it as about brightly colored and/or large headphones, a raised hood, eyes fixed squarely on the extremely unsubtle smartphone being held and interacted with in an extremely unsubtle way, and a general aura of “fuck off” makes people think “yes, this is a person who wants to have an inane conversation with a stranger about shit that has nothing to do with them and involves nobody they know”, but, uh, pro tip if you’re ever feeling ignored, I guess.
To be fair, Uzaki-chan and Sempai-kun aren’t strangers and she seems to mostly only see him in passing, so it’s understandable that she might not notice little things like him purposefully looking scarier whenever he walks past someone so they won’t try to strike up conversation, and isn’t privy to his internal monologue about how he likes the quiet and prefers to be left alone; but to be balanced, he does straight out tell her that he likes the quiet and prefers to be left alone.
I’m not entirely sure this anime deserves all the bad press it’s been getting. The character animation is nice and there’s some really good design work. While not exactly revolutionary, Uzaki manages to be cute without being cloying. Her boobs look huge from the front but comparatively normal-sized (though still big) from the side, which is a bit distracting, but then again, I don’t pay attention to boobs in real life so maybe that’s just what they look like in T-shirts. And while not my favorite generic protagonist design (that’d be fluffy hair and glasses, for the curious), I’ve always had a soft spot for spiky-haired anime boys with resting bitch face.
Call it damning with faint praise if you will, but Uzaki as a character is not nearly as irritating as she could be. Yeah, it’s annoying to have someone trying to force you to socialize when you’d prefer not to, but it’s not exactly a war crime, either. And Uzaki does mention that she and Protag-kun used to hang out, which makes her insistence on doing so a lot more understandable. Plus, there’s a conniving streak to her that I find refreshing in a character that could’ve easily been left as a genki airhead. Finally, I love love love love love when characters mention friends and/or significant others we don’t see. It’s one of the easiest ways in the world to establish them as having lives outside the main narrative, which in turn helps to flesh them out as more fully-realized and three dimensional, and yet it hardly ever happens. The only other example I can think of off the top of my head is Kawase from My Roommate Is A Cat‘s unseen wife.
And the main guy… exists. His one character trait is “grump,” but I like that there seems to be a mutual attraction, rather then him being nothing but annoyed by her. They have good chemistry, share some common interests, and their interactions are cute, which, yes, is a low bar, but it’s still a lot more than you get from your typical romcom.
Ultimately, how much you enjoy this episode will be predicated on how much you like the title character. If you find her annoying, you’ll likely be annoyed. For my part, I found her to be an amusing little gremlin. I don’t know if I’ll stick with this series all season, but it’s definitely earned at least three episodes, if only to find out what the fuck is up with that cat.
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