WataNare
Short Synopsis: Two high school girls test out a potential romantic relationship by alternating between friend and girlfriend days.
Wooper: A few posts back, I said that attraction overcoming the language barrier was one of the romance genre’s best tropes. Well, for every good fictional trope out there, there’s an equally terrible one, and WataNare is built around one of the worst of them all: the pretend relationship. Usually these sham couples are formed to win a bet, or get pesky suitors off one or both parties’ backs, but here the motivation is slightly more novel. High school madonna Mai falls in love with her awkward friend Renako, but Renako isn’t receptive to her confession, so Mai proposes that they spend half of their time as friends and the other half as Friends of Ellen. I could see that setup appealing to younger yuri fans, for whom the margin between platonic and romantic relationships may feel slim, but personally, I couldn’t get into it. Just five minutes into the episode, these two characters who I barely knew were sitting in a tree and spilling their insecurities to each other, and the very next day one had fallen in love with the other? It was all very hasty – but then, quickness is part of the show’s presentational style, with panicked inner thoughts and occasional outbursts on top of already swift dialogue. WataNare isn’t for me, but it has a clear identity, and its hair-swapped cast members are always on model, so I’d imagine that fans of the source material are pretty happy right now.
Potential: 20%
Gachiakuta
Short Synopsis: In a world where everyone is trash, people always find a way to push someone else even lower to feel better about themselves, and Rudo has been shoved all the way to the bottom.
Lenlo: Gotta say, as many edgy revenge shounen as we get each year, Gachiakuta has piqued my interest. Its setting of supposedly floating islands with a ruined, trash filled Earth below, and a tiered caste system combined with a weird obsession with trash, probably getting used as a metaphor for fitting into society and the traits people see as acceptable or something, was nice. The visuals weren’t half bad either, unafraid to use some thick line work at times, as well as some nice colors. My only real complaint so far is that the writing seems very… Blunt. Gachiakuta covers a lot of ground in this first episode, introducing us to the world, the MC, his family and general life situation, and then ripping it all away and plunging us headfirst into the plot as if it doesn’t think we don’t have the patience to sit through more than a single episode of setup. That’s all well and good if the rest of the show slows down and gives the world room to breathe a little bit, after all it’s hard to care about characters I’ve only known for 20 minutes. Still, if it can do that, if it can take its time now that it’s thrown us head first into this world, I think Gachiakuta could be some good fun, something akin to the over the top edge of Ragna Crimson. If that strikes your fancy and you just want a fun edgy romp, I’d say this is worth watching at least a few more episodes to see where it goes.
Potential: 50%
See You Tomorrow at the Food Court
Short Synopsis: Two teenage girls from different high schools meet at a food court to chat aimlessly.
Wooper: I like the idea behind Food Court de, Mata Ashita: two friends shooting the breeze with no overarching story to direct their conversations. Of course, such a plotless show will live and die by the content of those conversations, and that’s where Food Court stumbles. Its main characters, the grumbling Wada and the easygoing Yamamoto, don’t have much going on in their lives, so they (mostly Wada) have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for things to talk (mostly complain) about. Their very first topic is a prime example: the netizens insulting Wada for her textboard posts criticizing a character from a gacha game. I can’t think of many subjects that interest me less, and while their choice of discussion fodder improved from there, it remained superficial enough that I had to wonder why the Food Court manga was selected for an anime adaptation. Even a professional voice actor would be hard pressed to dimensionalize Wada’s shallow gripes about error-prone cashiers or airheaded NPCs. Maybe Yamamoto, whose interest in the supernatural generated some of the episode’s better moments, will steer a higher percentage of future conversations – even if she does, though, I won’t be around to find out.
Potential: 5%
The post Summer 2025 Impressions: WataNare, Gachiakuta, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court appeared first on Star Crossed Anime.
