Review of Horimiya

Light spoilers* I've read the manga of this as well. You know, there's nothing that I love more than a good, heartwarming, cute romance anime/manga. A story that warms your heart, that presents you with lovable and fun characters, and that presents a love story in an original and fun way. Horimiya only has little of all of that. And one major, glaring issue with one character that I just can't get over. The story is... okay. The romance between Hori and Miyamura is nice and cute at the start of the show, and there's a fair few cute moments and things to love early on. But evenin terms of slice of life anime, there really isn't a whole lot that happens here, at any point. It's all incredibly average "cutesy" moments that we've all seen a billion times in other romcoms.

The secondary characters are cool too, each presenting a fun personality that adds something to the friend group that starts to form. Except they don't really get much development and eventually fall flat on their faces because of how dull they are and ultimately how uninvolved in the plot they end up being.

Going back to our MC couple and that glaring issue I mentionned early on...

Hori.

Now, for a quick comparison to other popular romance anime, you know how people complain about Nagatoro from "Ijiranaide, Nagatoro-san" for being too much of a bully and about Taiga from "Toradora" for being too aggressive? Well, both of those characters in their respective series never really hurt the male MC in any significant way. They were fine with it, even. (Especially the MC in Nagatoro-san who even enjoys the whole thing)

But Hori in this series... She's straight up abusive. More so than any tsundere or sadodere I've ever seen in any anime or manga in the genre. She physically harms Miyamura multiple times throughout the series, and we can see that Miyamura is never okay with it. You can say as an excuse that "It's just a fetish" that Hori has, or whatever, but Miyamura is clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing anyway.

This straight-up ruins the series for me, as any redeemable qualities that the show may have are destroyed by the fact that the romance between the MCs- the main plot of the show, is full of abuse and consent issues.

If you're fine with all the things I just mentioned, and you just want a mediocre romcom experience with otherwise passable characters, decent visuals and sound and ok overall enjoyment, go ahead and watch this. But this one was kinda painful to finish, and I honestly regret watching and reading this.

Trash/10. So. Freaking. Overrated.