Review of given

Given was perhaps the most surprising anime of 2019 for me. The only BL anime that I had seen prior to Given was Doukyuusei, which may have been great, but I had thought that it was an outlier in the genre. So when Given started airing and I immediately loved it, I was quite taken aback. To get this out of the way, the music in Given was great. Math Rock is a prolific genre in Japan, often featuring in anime openings and endings. However, despite there being many music anime, math rock never seems to be the genre of music that the character’splay. Given finally satisfied my very specific need to see an amatuer band of anime character’s playing math rock, so even ignoring everything else that happens in the show, I was already very pleased with the music, which is important for an anime focused on music. But fortunately for Given, it had far more going for it than simply having good music. I saw Given being described as K-On but with boys, and for the most part, I find this to be a more than adequate explanation of the show. The show focuses on four characters, all of whom are entertaining to watch, have great chemistry with one another, and are overall, well written characters. In what I am assuming is typical for shounen and shoujo ai stories, practically every character is gay and in love with another character, which was a fairly large hurdle of believability for me to get over, but once I came to terms with it, I was happy to see that each of the couples genuinely had a lot of chemistry and felt as though they could be couples in real life. This is mostly due to the fantastic dialogue. I mentioned the K-On comparison earlier, and a large part of that comparison comes from the way that the dialogue is written. All of the characters' interactions felt so natural, which was a large reason for the attachment that I came to feel to them.

The story also ended up being far more emotionally driven than I had initially expected. Mafuyu’s past of loss and tragedy was handled well and served to, at first increase the emotional distance between Mafuyu and Uenoyama, but eventually bring them closer together. Given had a few emotional highs, but the band’s performance episode was easily my favourite part of the entire show, and what really drove home how genuinely great this show actually was. It seemed like a last episode, but I was pleasantly surprised when there were two additional episodes to deal with the ramifications of what happened at the performance. These two episodes finally brought everything together and wrapped things up for the main couple nicely, with the final episode being particularly memorable.

Overall, Given isn’t a show that will leave you pondering the intricacies of its plot, or one that will have you spellbound by its gorgeous visuals. It’s a simple show about a group of boys playing music and being in love, with lovable characters, great music, and a fantastic emotional throughline. If you can get over the fact that, unlike shows of this nature with girls, the characters are not only gay, but actually do more than bait the audience and some are even in relationships, then you’ll find a very enjoyable show.