I thought I was prepared for the awful relationship shows this season, but clearly not.
Impressions:
I suppose there’s been a hojillion things where a bland, boring dude does one nice thing for the popular girl and they become an obsessive stalker, completely devoted to the Nice Guy, so it’s only fair to have the genders reversed. But I have a great deal of disdain for those things, and this one really ramps up not just the stalker angle but romanticizes the absolute hell out of it. He spends the entire episode obsessing over every single little thing she says and that wins her over by showing how much he cares and how that fills her with strange new feelings that manifest as the generic pink shoujo sparkles.
That’s not romantic! It’s weird and creepy, and the merest figleaf of saying that once and then changing your mind and saying that it’s actually super duper romantic is a mixed message at best. You could salvage it on a character front by showing some development or change that they bring out in each other. Or at the very least, some chemistry, because christ, are these two characters boring sacks of dough who are trying to pass off “has an internal monologue about how they have no personality” as a personality. The girl going from “I don’t like boys” to “Wait, maybe I do” ain’t it. And glamorizing an unhealthy obsession based on one act of empathy is the opposite of growth. It’s justifying not developing, and it’s lionizing unhealthy, weird behavior.
