Review of Horimiya
Horimiya is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated anime of 2021. It's one of the fan's favourite anime of the year and I can see why it is. The relationship between Hori and Miyamura is nothing but a fine normal romance, they like each other, they hang out with each other. It's very wholesome and everyone wants to have a romantic relationship like Horimiya. Not to mention the main character Miyamura was a sad child before, but after seeing Hori, his life both in school and public changed. Everyone feels for Miyamura and respect him as one of the characters that can change himself. Itoo should feel like that, but instead, I came up with a lot of problems and flaws.
In its premise, it seems like the story is about Hori's. Five minutes into the first episode and all I can see is Hori doing things in daily life. Miyamura was also there in the background like "a surprised tool that will help us later". To me, this feels like both of them mind on their own business until fate put them together kind of things, and it's not wrong at all to do something like that. What I expected is, that's right, character development and romance progression. It's a norm to think of it like this since I've seen quite a bunch of rom-com and this probably gonna end it like that. However, what I see at the end of the anime is Miyamura talking to himself that "Yes I moved on, get real". After completing it, I ask myself, "Damn, so what is the premise?"
Where's Hori? Did she progress her own personality? Well, maybe. You can argue with that, but at the end of the day, that side of things is being much less significant than THIS ending. This type of ending could be found at the end of one's arc, not the ending itself. It feels more like "yeah this is Rei Kiriyama's story and I'll show you how this family changed his life" rather than "owo wholesome romance make his life turned upside down", which is a completely different genre, this is NOT drama slice of life. Yeah sure, Miyamura's development is great and I absolutely agree with that. What's my point is this anime puts it in a very wrong way, shifting the main story to its core. How could you tell that? Just look at each episode of Horimiya. Most of them contain at least one flashback from Miyamura's past, he found his old friends, old foes and much more. To me Miyamura is like, Ishigami in Kaguya-sama love is war. He is relatable as fuck, have a tragic past, and have quite a decent development throughout the series. Now shoved all KaguPrez and Chika dance shit to the side and focus on Ishigami-- that's Horimiya, and I'm quite disappointed.
Horimiya is known for its unique plot. It doesn't follow any cliche, no arcs, nearly no interruption scene, it has nothing. Yes, nothing. This is unironically the second point I found, it is too normal to be true. Even in real life is more bizarre than this fucking school but who am I saying, maybe it really had nothing right? Not really, there's something. There are connections, there are unique moments that these people experienced in the manga, but they did not adopt it so they could crush it in 13 episodes by only telling the main plot. It's like the slice of life section is any better as its plot is driven by nothing. A lot of anime have arcs for a reason, to set the directions of where the story would go, plus some character development if the writer wants to. Not only that, we get to understand each character and see how they grow as time went by, too. Without any arc, the plot is pretty much scattered everywhere and could be boring as time goes by. In Clannad, even though they go out of the loop, you still know that the main point is to put a play in a culture festival. We can see each character struggles and try to change themselves like Ishigami in Kaguya-sama, which is related to sports festival arc. It's there to move the story and entertain us more. Then again, there ARE arcs in Horimiya manga but the anime just ran over it. Maybe the director makes this feel like we're entering online school in a pandemic or something, I don't get it.
I will try not to bash on the comedy section much since it's a very subjective one, but it is quite important as it could make me view the series in a better way. That's right, I think this series is not funny at all, comedic pace is out of place most of the time but hey, maybe I have trash taste in comedy after all. I still like amogus meme and laugh at something random. People's humour is weird sometimes.
Sound and Visual falls into a "could've been better" section. It's not good but at the same time, it's not bad. I have no comment on it.
The last thing I don't really like is how they waste so many characters. As I said, arcs help us understand the character better but this has nothing. Most character is just there as "Miyamura's friend" to solidify that his life changed. The progress between other couples like Yuki-Tooru and Remi-Segoku become unimportant as it is only depicted twice throughout the series. "Oh you know it's about what high school students always do" yeah right, and they never brought up the topic again. Oh, and can we talk about how they waste such an interesting character like Sawada. It's so sad they only give her a scene for only one episode when she has quite an interesting background.
Horimiya tries to condense 100+ chapters into 1 season of anime. It's like trying to put the entire Kaguya-sama: Love is war story into a 1 cour season. The treasure of the story isn't at the end, but it's the content between them, and Horimiya has little to no content between them. Is it wrong to like this anime? Nope. You can like whatever you want. It's bad, but it's NOT that bad to say this is trash or something. I'm just disappointed that it could've been direct better.