Fascinating. Swings wildly between slow, boring conversations punctuated by manufactured drama and... beautiful tone poems where the characters sit quietly and eat dinner and my eyes are glued to the screen the whole time? What?
This apparently started as a YouTube series and veered off into a series of novels before the anime adaptation, and somehow that makes sense; the series never seems to settle on what it wants to be.
The plot is just as unsettled: two stepsiblings, living in a world where nearly every conversation they have with *anyone* is about whether they're going to hook up, trying very hard not to hook up, and (spoiler) managing not to hook up, which feels just as triumphant as when the characters in a typical romance series *do* hook up.
The overarching mood is tension: Tension when they talk to other people, tension when they hang out together, tension when they sit by themselves on quiet nights. Yes, the tension is about something a bit silly -- trying to resist attraction in a world where absolutely no one would mind, to the point that the random college class you happen to walk past is about the noble history of incest -- but it still works, like, half the time. Good enough for a 6 out of 10, even though I literally fast-forwarded through the last three episodes out of sheer impatience when they ran out of new directorial techniques.
This apparently started as a YouTube series and veered off into a series of novels before the anime adaptation, and somehow that makes sense; the series never seems to settle on what it wants to be.
The plot is just as unsettled: two stepsiblings, living in a world where nearly every conversation they have with *anyone* is about whether they're going to hook up, trying very hard not to hook up, and (spoiler) managing not to hook up, which feels just as triumphant as when the characters in a typical romance series *do* hook up.
The overarching mood is tension: Tension when they talk to other people, tension when they hang out together, tension when they sit by themselves on quiet nights. Yes, the tension is about something a bit silly -- trying to resist attraction in a world where absolutely no one would mind, to the point that the random college class you happen to walk past is about the noble history of incest -- but it still works, like, half the time. Good enough for a 6 out of 10, even though I literally fast-forwarded through the last three episodes out of sheer impatience when they ran out of new directorial techniques.
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