Review of given

There’s no question that Given is *the* BL anime of the modern era. It is the most watched BL on MAL, constantly tops popularity polls, and whenever anyone these days gives BL recommendations, the first thing you hear is Given, Given, Given. It’s also disappointing. Here’s the thing: Given is a drama. It takes itself extremely seriously, so I will take it extremely seriously as well, and thus come to the conclusion that it is not as deep and intelligent as it markets itself as. Now, Given isn’t bad. It’s a competent story and the relationship between the leads, Ritsuka and Mafuyu, is well done. They hadgood chemistry, their relationship was well developed, and I liked how the top was the awkward and inexperienced one paired up with a more self-assured and experienced bottom. It’s a more refreshing take on tired tropes. However, Given is not just a romance, but as I stated before, a romantic drama, and it is in the drama where the problem lies.

There is one main source of drama in this show: grief. (I don’t consider this a spoiler, but if you want to go in blind, stop reading now). Mafuyu, the love interest, is grieving. Very specifically he is grieving his late boyfriend who killed himself.

And that? That’s something. In fact, it was why I wanted to watch the show to begin with. It has so much potential to be a very grounded and deep story about not just grief, but the very specific trauma of losing someone to suicide. There’s so much room there for it to be such a meaningful story about processing trauma and recovery.

And…well, I can’t say it’s *not* that, but I will say that I don’t think it’s enough. The way it addresses this clear trauma is very skin deep, and it feels almost like set dressing. It’s there, and Mafuyu clearly thinks about it regularly, but we don’t really get to see any introspection or reflection on his feelings, let alone the nasty effects that kind of trauma inherently has.

You wanna know something? Yuki, Mafuyu’s late boyfriend, didn’t just kill himself. He killed himself after the two had an argument, and then Mafuyu was the one who found his body.

It needs more. It needs more introspection—about how personally hurt he is, how he simultaneously blames both himself and Yuki, how he hates himself for causing this but hates Yuki for doing this to him, how he still gets flashbacks of finding the body, how he still loves Yuki despite all of that—just...*something.*

But we don’t get anything like that. It’s a trauma that inherently causes a storm of conflicting emotions and negative effects, and we don’t see anything like that. We just know he’s grieving, and it’s sad.

And remember, this isn’t just a drama, but a romantic drama. Dating again while you’re still grieving your old partner is difficult and complicated, so it *should* come with a lot of reflection on the trauma and grief, but in Given, it doesn’t. Mafuyu is grieving and sad but he never talks about his feelings, shows any nasty side effects of the trauma, or lets it affect his new relationship.

I say this as someone who has some personal experience with this subject, because it feels to me like the author does not. There was so much potential for it to be extremely meaningful, but it just comes off like it was added for pathos.

That’s my only real hangup with these 12 episodes. As I said, the story is competent and the main romance is well developed (although, I would not have put their first kiss during the one time Mafuyu was grieving the *most* lmao. Like, what?).

In this first season, the beta couple is also fine, although this does only apply to this first season. I’ll warn you now, the first movie is focused on the beta couple, and it includes the infuriating BL trope of a character being sexually assaulted by his love interest. In fact, it’s worse than a lot of other BL that play the assault as sexy and romantic, because Given fully plays the assault for drama—presenting it as horrifying and upsetting—but then the victim still chooses to forgive the perpetrator and they end up together in the end. I'm not saying it's impossible to pull something like that off (for example, I think The Rose of Versailles...kind of made it work—at least better than this) but it's *extremely* hard to do, and I think Given didn't do it well, with how the perpetrator's reasoning felt rather unfounded and he didn't seem nearly apologetic enough, not to mention they hardly even dwell on it. It was a really graphic scene of sexual assault too.

The review is marked as a 7/10 because it’s only for the first season (it’s easy to pretend the movie didn’t happen), but I thoroughly dislike the movie, so I’d probably give the manga a 6/10.

Not bad, but disappointing.