Review of Horimiya

12 years of school, from elementary to high, whether you enjoyed it or hated it each of us have gone through 12 years of school. We all have good and bad memories from it, it's an experience that has shaped us into the person we are today... it's an experience that we'll never get to live again I first picked up the horimiya manga back when I was a highschool student, sophomore year. I didn't really enjoy my time in higshcool, I couldn't wait to graduate and start life anew 4 years later, I just finished watching the anime and it left me with mixed feelings, thestory of horimiya is very VERY character-focused, we are given a lot of time to understand each character to a very deep extent, we laugh with them and we cry for them we feel happy for them, sad for them... we understand them. The characters felt human, they felt real. The manga wasn't about hori and miyamura but rather, about their daily lives, about their school, their friends and their close ones.
The anime adaptation took a different direction, the characters are the same characters, the story is them same, but the pacing is much faster, a lot of crucial (not so crucial) moments from the manga were just glanced over or skipped altogether, and it left us, the viewers, with gaps in our understanding of the surrounding characters. We don't see the relationships being formed over time we just see characters suddenly getting along better. We don't see how the characters deal with obstacles and improve themselves, we just suddenly see them changed. I could argue that that the producers missed the point of the horimiya manga.

BUT, this isn't the manga, this is the anime. And the anime had a different message for us.

Each episode of horimiya is spanned over the course of multiple days, and we see the time fly by us in those days. We we see the seasons change and with each passing moments we are reminded that even highschool doesn't last forever. It leaves us on a very bittersweet note.
Looking back on our time in school, although it felt very long at the time. In actuality these were fleeting years. They passed by us without us even noticing and before we knew it we grew up and took on different responsibilities

TLDR
As I mentioned before a lot of the important moments from the manga were just glanced over. When you try to adapt 122 chapters, and two canon years of manga material into one season it's a given that some sacrifaces are gonna be made. I persoanlly don't think the characters deserve such a treatment and I was hoping to see the full story of horimiya being told with 2 or 3 seasons. But if it weren't for these sacrifices I don't think that the themes of bittersweetness and nostalgia would be as prominent otherwise.

I hope that this review will find its way to you, who hates school and your classmates. You who wants to run away to some place remote from everyone you know. And I hope that rather than watch this anime you choose to read the manga and it will do to you, what it did to me.