I take it back. I once thought Kimi no Todoke was just a commonly-used shoujo manga story setup with a remark­ably good pre­sen­ta­tion. Oh, it’s still stereo­typ­i­cal, and we can still see the incom­ing events from a mile away. But to take such plain story/character con­cepts and — for­get touch­ing my soul, try hug­ging and deeply embrac­ing it — Kimi no Todoke has gone beyond just an excep­tional sto­ry­telling style. It doesn’t need the scream­ing drama and con­ve­nient rev­e­la­tions of shows like Toradora. It doesn’t need the sur­real premises of KEY works, nor the con­trast­ing dark­ness that main char­ac­ters must chal­lenge in most Nakige visual nov­els. It doesn’t even need to focus on the main pair­ing rela­tion­ship like one would expect out of a romance drama, espe­cially shoujo. It man­ages to warm the soul and draw tears from our heart with­out any of those excep­tional ele­ments, with­out even the need to make us feel depressed. That, is pre­cisely why Kimi no Todoke is so pro­found in its own right: its pre­sen­ta­tion isn’t just excep­tional, it’s godly.

The setup of this story is so com­mon it feels like it could hap­pen in your neigh­bor­hood; the deliv­ery of the story feels like it did hap­pen in your neigh­bor­hood, to your best friends and right before your very eyes.

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It’s ironic in a way. Kimi no Todoke adheres to stay within the box of nor­mal shoujo manga, but in doing so it exceeded the lim­its of not just the shoujo genre, but tra­di­tional romance-drama in general…

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It’s the first sea­son after my post-graduation life setup. With­out an engi­neer­ing ‘double’-major I find a lot of time at my hands and tries to allo­cate a good chunk of it towards anime. Well that was a poor choice, as Japan sees fit to send me the most dis­ap­point­ing anime sea­son of my life.

Onee-sama is not amused

Well, let me try going through a list of all the things I watched wasted time on… I’ll save Rail­gun and Todoke for last as they’re the only two that really man­aged to save me from bang­ing my head against the wall repeatedly.

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I’m still decid­ing on my anime blog­ging style. Def­i­nitely not the episodic type, but I fig­ure I’ll try to get four in per sea­son: pre-season expec­ta­tions, ini­tial insights (1~2eps), mid-season impres­sions (6~8eps), and end­ing reviews.

I’m happy and I meant it~

Other than Rail­gun which I’ve already read, most of the 2009 fall anime sea­son has been Meh for me… or so I thought, until I caught up to the stun­ning first cli­max of Kimi ni Todoke, which is quickly becom­ing a mas­ter­piece in my book. I did end up drop­ping two series, but they were ones I never expected to watch in the first place.

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