Review of Sasaki and Miyano

TL;DR – Sasaki to Miyano is a good BL, but nothing new or notable was achieved. While better than older BL anime, this anime sadly fell into familiar tropes. Two “straight” teens suddenly find themselves attracted to each other, one of them is bold about expressing how they feel while the other is all blushes and anxiety. “He’s so cute… But he’s a boy, so whatever will I do?!” The most progressive spin I can apply to this trope is, “They are discovering their sexuality while dealing with the pressure of heteronormative expectations.” But when the characters say, “I’m straight” and “But I like girls”to themselves, it kinda undermines that argument in my book.

Despite falling hard into this bad plotline, the anime itself has a fairly compelling story, the character building for our two mains is decent, the animation is generally well done, and the anime doesn’t insist on pushing each male character into a same-sex relationship, which is a nice touch. The anime also pokes fun at itself, with BL manga being the hobby which draws our two protagonists closer together and there’s plenty of references to BL tropes and sub-genres too.

We really do not get to see the home lives of either Sasaki or Miyano however, which is something I feel hurts the anime. We’re led to believe that these two really only have a life at school or on their way to and from school, which limits character depth and leaves potentially compelling plots off the table. To be fair, this shortcoming seems to be common in amine involving high school students, so I suppose that would give a pass to this anime too.

Is this anime as good as Given, The Stranger by the Shore, or Twilight Out of Focus? Honestly, I’d say that this is on-par with Twilight Out of Focus’s better episodes, but not quite hitting the same mark as Stranger or Given, but if you liked any of those, you’ll probably like this as well. Twilight Out of Focus certainly broke a lot of boundaries for gay representation in anime, but only in a few of the episodes, while the rest was very trope-y. Sasaki to Miyano hews much closer to safer territory, with zero mentions of sex, reusing tropes, and keeping things very PG.