When Hachiman ticks off the wrong teacher, he finds himself forced into a club to socialize with others.
What They Say:
So exactly what’s going to happen when Hachiman Hikigaya, an isolated high school student with no friends, no interest in making any and a belief that everyone else’s supposedly great high school experiences are either delusions or outright lies, is coerced by a well meaning faculty member into joining the one member “Services Club” run by Yukino Yukinoshita, who’s smart, attractive and generally considers everyone in her school to be her complete inferior?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
High school series are obviously a dime a dozen for the last decade or so, but there’s always some that shine through with what they do. Sometimes it’s just a name that can draw you in to see what it’s all about, and this one certainly has an interesting one that catches the eye and makes you wonder a bit more about it. Based on the light novel series by Wataru Watari that began in 2011 and has seven volumes so far, we get this new twelve episode series animated by Brain’s Based. And that’s something that doubly catches my attention as they tend to produce some interesting looking shows, even if the stories don’t always fire on all cylinders.
The series revolves around a high school student named Hachiman, a young man who has absolutely no love or interest in high school and sees the whole thing as just one big trial to get through in order to get to something better. He has a certain disdain for others that makes him seem superior in a way, but you get the feeling that it’s not quite a superiority he feels over everyone else but rather just a complete disinterest in playing the game that is high school to him. Unfortunately, he crosses the wrong teacher with an essay that he’s written and she forces him into a club in order to try and socialize him a bit. This brings him into contact with Yukino, a somewhat solitary student herself who runs the Service Club as its only member. She’s definitely an attractive young woman, but it’s made clear that she has a cold personality that keeps others at bay. It certainly makes the two a difficult pair to get along with each other.
Amusingly, Hachiman does his best to ensure that he’s not falling into a rom-com trap by being aggressive with her in a way that sets him as an alpha, but she’s just as harsh as he is and pushes back easily, enough so that she actually manages to dominate him for a bit through her personality. There’s some interesting interplay between the two as they spend time together, but it gets more complicated when another student is sent there named Yui. She’s a bit more outgoing than Hachiman and Yukino but as she watches the way those two interact, she finds herself intrigued by this club. The group has an odd feeling to it, a real mishmash of students when you get down to it, and that’s something we’ve seen in other series. But there’s something a little different here with how they come together and their personalities in that it doesn’t feel quite so cookie cutter. At least not yet.
In Summary:
With the first episode of the series, we get something that’s pretty laid back here even as three very different personalities are brought together into the Service Club. There’s something interesting about each of them with what we do get of their personalities and I’ll easily admit that I want to get to know more about each of them to see why they are the way they are an dhow they’ll interact with each other as time goes on. There isn’t anything amazing or hugely incredible about the show at this point, but it has a slightly off kilter view of things that has me interesting in seeing if it can carve out some new territory or just tread what has come before. So far, I think it has some potential, but it can falter easily. But there’s enough here to separate it from the usual shows to make me want to follow it.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.