Anime review: Yagate Kimi ni Naru (2018)

This is, I think, my first explicit yuri (love between girls) anime to this day and I was definitely skeptical about it. The good news is that I'm such a hopeless romantic that I didn't care (at least in fiction) but the bad news is that this ended up being boring.

Which is too bad, because the idea of a main character too autistic to feel love is interesting, but everything other than this idea (including its execution) was so lifeless watching it turned into a chore helped solely by wanting to know how it ends.

Spoiler: it doesn't, stops in such a jarring manner that I genuinely checked if I didn't forget to download a 14th episode; it apparently adapts only half of the source manga.

The lifelessness isn't only due to the writing, the production (dull animation with cheap backgrounds, decent-to-meh VA, boring music except the genuinely good ED) is as responsible if not more.

Add to that the criminally neglected secondary characters and you've got the recipe for a bland dish. And when I say "criminally" I mean it: be it the love triangle completely forgotten by the end, the tomboy in love with her basketball senpai or the two boys who joined the student council (especially Maki, since he got an episode just for himself only to be forgotten too), I simply don't understand how the writer's brain works…

It feels like they thought they had a second season to truly get to the meat of it so they took some time noodling around until they got the bad news.

Truly, compared to my gold standard for serious romance (Kare Kano, which I'll review this summer), this was flatter than plain, lukewarm water. Even without comparing it to such a legendary GAINAX work, 2023's Boku no Kokoro no Yabai Yatsu was light-years ahead.