Review of Sasaki and Miyano

Sasaki and Miyano is a shallow romance series, where our two leads consist of one guy working up to a 10-year-old's understanding of love and another guy who never learned about boundaries or self-reflection. But worst of all, nothing frigging happens over the whole show. Let's start with that. The pacing is reminiscent of an adaptation of a never-ending light novel series. It's obvious the kids fall for each other pretty much immediately, yet they'll still waffle over what it all means for the majority of the show's total runtime. The grand feelings realization scenes that should be pivotal for any romance series have zero impactbecause they get recycled so frequently by the show, sometimes even in back-to-back episodes. On top of that, we get multiple instances of Sasaki telling Miyano he likes him, to which Miyano emphatically does nothing. At best, he'll hem and haw about not being able to give an answer right now, and Sasaki will accept it by saying he'll wait forever because he's a pathetic fool. The wheel spinning is made worse by the concept of time itself being completely weightless. When the characters see each other again, how much time has passed since we last saw them? A day? A week? Three months? It's impossible to tell until the characters explicitly inform the audience that yes, three months have indeed passed since our last banal conversation. The frequent time skips for seemingly no reason makes it hard to care about the cast it outright denies the chance of seeing them develop over the normal course of a school year. Or well, the chance would have been denied if they had developed at all, that is.

Which brings me to my second point: the extended cast is an empty shell. None of them matter except to exist in the periphery of Sasaki and Miyano. Thus, the setting comes off as artificial. This feeling is best encapsulated in the women in the show, because they effectively do not exist. We get about four minutes of screentime with Miyano's middle school crush in one episode, then we never mention it again, and that's basically it as far as named characters go. Multiple boys in the cast have girlfriends they frequently talk about, but they never get any names and we don't ever get to see their faces. Every opportunity for one of our leads to potentially meet one of them is conveniently brushed aside. ("Wanna visit my girlfriend in the hospital with me? No? Okay."; "Hey, I was gonna come to the cultural festival with my girlfriend, but she said she couldn't make it.") Halfway through the show, I was entertaining the idea that at least one of the girlfriends was completely made up, which would be some character trait to explore rather than the nothing burger the show keeps taunting us with.

All this could be tolerable if the central relationship was engaging, but it's the least appetizing element of the show somehow. The romance is vapid and fueled purely by physical attraction, despite what Sasaki might claim. But of course, what else could it be? The leads basically have no personality traits to speak of. They both like BL (boy, does the show want you to know they like BL), but other than that Miyano is insecure and Sasaki is prone to intense bouts of jealousy. Real keepers, the both of them. Supposed delinquent Sasaki never even gets shown breaking any school rules, aside from I guess briefly beating up some kids who were beating up another kid in episode 1. The most characterization we get is when the show dips into dated BL manga tropes that I remember being sick of in the early 2000s. For example, at one point Sasaki meets up with Miyano in an empty classroom, and he secretly locks the door behind him, and no one even comments on him doing this afterwards. I'm sure the show is going for the "Aw, he's so in love with him that he can't help himself from behaving badly" angle, but the sexual assault connotations really don't help its case.

What I'll give the show is that it's decent enough production-wise, though the overuse of geometry-adorned bloom effects gets tiring very quickly. It looks okay, which puts the show heads and shoulders over most BL anime. If you want something with substance however, I recommend looking anywhere else.