as an anime adaptation of a manga adaptation of a popular yet crudely drawn web comic hori Mia not unlike one punch man is a story so nice they told it Thrice is what I would say if the original webcomic horizontomy American did not also have its own strikingly stylized OVA adaptation sadly not available in English yet meaning this one's actually so nice they told it quadrice that's more times than we have real words for and a lot of times for anything let alone a series of crudely rendered jpegs that were given away for free by
some nobody on the internet in 2007. it's self-evident that there is something special about hori Mia and that's a pretty wild thought because there's absolutely nothing self-evidently special about hori Mia amid a winter Buffet of bold ambitious quirky anime Cuisine it it stands out as a simple yet Exquisite Comfort dish a coming-of-age rom-com about normal teenagers at a normal high school trying to figure out what exactly normal is if you're not familiar Kyoko hori is a popular girl with good grades who spends most of her free time taking care of her little brother Sota in
lieu of their busy parents none of her friends or classmates know about this side of her life until one day a handsome well-dressed bad boy kindly brings her brother home to patch up a boo-boo it turns out that this styling stranger is miyamura a quiet bespectacled loner from hori's class who everyone just assumes is a weirdo taku even though he's actually just kinda dumb and socially awkward and only uses his thick ugly school clothes and uncamped hair to hide sick cats and piercings the unlikely pair quickly discovered that despite their apparent differences they actually have
a ton in common and days of Youth like the scent of fresh lemons you see ensue there's no cutesy genre premise or clever structural gimmick with which two elevator pitch a potential viewer on hori Mia only pure romantic chemistry this isn't auron bunny girl Senpai or kaguyasama it doesn't even have a mystery box hook to string viewers along like quintessential quintuplets the sequel to which according to Mal this new anime is currently outperforming along with almost every other big ticket sequel this season including re-zero and reincarnated as a slime but excluding the Shonen big three
of Dr Stone The Promised Neverland and Attack on Titan really think about that this season contains its own big three and Jujutsu Kaizen is still running yet here I am about to discuss us a show where some papers falling out of a window is a heart-pounding event but first speaking of the quintessential quintuplets if you like hori Mia you'll probably like that too it is a harem but a thoroughly wholesome one with Rich characters and a ton of heart the new anime season has been going great but the manga is still the best way to
experience that Doki Doki goodness at least in my book which can be your book too because in celebration of its finale the quintessential quintuplets manga happens to be on sale until March 8th in high resolution ebook form via bookwalker where you can buy a bundle of the whole series for 30 off plus you'll get a beautiful bonus illustration just for buying Volume 14 and you can bump that up to a 35 discount while simultaneously helping me out by using the promo code basement at checkout to get an additional 600 Yen off alternatively if if you
already own some of the series you can get 15 coin back on the rest of them to put toward future purchases of digital light novels and or Manga manga like hori Mia which bookwalker also has all 14 volumes of those aren't on sale right now but they are really good and you can still use the promo code basement for a discount on them or anything else in bookwalker's vast and ever-expanding catalog click the link in the doobly-doo to check out that promotion or click the other link to get the hori Mia manga today now back
to the romance so what makes horimia so special to put it simply craftsmanship it is a sublimely efficient work of narrative mechanical engineering a story machine whose every component character is as expertly made and carefully tuned as the gears of a Swiss watch if you've watched it then you've felt exactly what I'm talking about the delicate Bittersweet Pang of the teenage crush is a difficult feeling to accurately emulate in narrative media realistic romance Manga and Anime like kimini Todoke and Toradora tend to go a little Larger than Life with their characters and emotional conflicts drawing
out will they won't they questions to absurd wanks and leveraging the dynamism of melodrama to create a feeling that's similar to but much more intense than the real thing butterflies and Doki dokis to be sure but of the sort a roller coaster Master might deliver hori Mia on the other hand is a more subtly thrilling ride like coasting downhill through winding city streets a back an overburdened one-seat bicycle with very little hyperbole at least by anime standards it seeks to honestly portray the fleeting yet in the moment all-consuming profundity of pubescent [ __ ] what
kaguyasama made an endlessly hilarious joke out of this series tackles with unerring unembellished sincerity to shockingly powerful effect hori Mia's characters don't get endlessly hung up on absurd misunderstandings they could solve with a single text message or entangled and improbably convoluted love geometry they get hurt by poorly chosen words burden themselves and each other with tempestuous irrational anxieties and struggle to juggle life school and family from one day to the next you know like actual teenagers most of this show slash manga's driving conflicts are things that will not matter to anyone in 10 years or
even 10 minutes yet matter more than anything to these characters in this moment in the first episode's big emotional climax an unwanted gesture of self-deprecation meant to help hurry save face with people whose opinions don't actually matter to her instead ends up making her feel like miamura's abandoning her with a convenient excuse that really hurts her feelings and they need to talk it out it doesn't sound that exciting in the retelling but trust me it is captivating when you're there one outstanding later chapter sees hori on the verge of tears all day because of something
miyamura said to her in a dream which sounds absurd and is absurd but in a way that's deeply human and believable many of us have been there and or done that and in exploring the honest complex intimate emotions of this common mundane nothing of a personal problem hori Mia successfully delivers both the Doki dokis and the fuofuas in copious quantities along with some pretty hearty Chuckles a lot of these conflicts like a lot of conflicts in teenage relationships are the sort of thing one laughs at when looked back upon and hori Mia leans into that
very specific feeling to allow how its comedic elements to exist in close but comfortable proximity to its heavier emotional loads the depth and Nuance of character required to make fundamentally small conflicts like this resonates so strongly and broadly is staggering which is why most romance manga writers cling so long to all reliable universally relatable I think they like me but I don't know if they like me like me pre-relationship romantic tension stretching it well past the breaking point of believability in the relatively Uncharted Territory beyond the confession actually dating and stuff each couple's story becomes
their own it's forward momentum fueled not by formula but the unique chemistry between them that's a hard to write hori Mia charges into it without hesitation its Central couple establishes that they're special to each other in its first episode hands are held in its third and there's a confession on the field by the fourth which hori's deadbeat dad obliviously pressures her into answering in the middle of his own character introduction scene in the fifth simultaneously cementing himself in our minds as a childishly overbearing nuisance who makes everything about him even the moment of climactic romantic
catharsis that the whole series until now has been building to which is to be fair all the sweeter for the weight when the kids are at last left alone and it finally sets in that they're like totes dating for realsies now the unexpected deviation into comedy right before the Romantic climax makes that climax when it does arrive feel fresh exciting and unexpected in a way that I don't think it would if they tried to play it straight it also allows the series to give a fairly Complicated new character a very memorable introduction and significantly develop
all of the established characters in the hori family in the space of just a few minutes and or Pages this one scene tells us everything we need to know about kiosuke through how he reacts to and disrupts the story's status quo and how his daughter and especially wife react to him Eureka's polite passive aggression is positively Savage learning about kiosuke in turn tells us a great deal about Kyoko why she is the way she is why she's so drawn to Reliable kind unassertive miyamora and why she's so possessive and anxious about the prospect of him
abandoning her out of the blue thoughtfully layered efficient writing like this is what what allows the story to move so swiftly through its Opening Act without feeling rushed or softening the emotional impact of key moments when you break it down there aren't a lot of scenes between horimia's meat cute and big relationship status update but it makes the most of each and every one using them to simultaneously develop and Advance the central romance deliver solid self-contained jokes and emotional beats and expand upon the vast Supporting Cast in equal measure to the characters with their names
in the title by the time you've reached that episode 5 climax you've experienced a greater density of emotions and meaningful character developments than you'll find in many series Thrice the length and the transition to a full-blown relationship feels well earned we understand perfectly well what these characters mean to each other why they need each other and how exact hopefully they've grown ready to be together and from that point forward they continue to grow together around each other as we discover more about both of them alongside each of them this is one of the most fun
stages of a relationship and for obvious reasons fertile ground for character-driven comedy and storytelling hard stuff to write but hero writes it well and it's the essence of what makes hori Mia so complex and compelling hori and miyamura are orbited by other teens in their own states of will they won't they entanglement who provide complementary flavors of forlorn cross-classroom glancing and allow the series to indulge in tropier romantic storytelling when it wants to cooking lessons love triangles that whole bit but horimiya never uses cliche as a crutch it does use it as effective shorthand though
allowing for moments that other Manga and Anime might soak in Sil to pass without unnecessary comment take the scene where Sakura Falls for toru not a lot really happens in it some papers are dropped picked up and delivered alongside a single compliment and we don't hear either character's internal monologue but the framing the very Shoujo directorial flourishes and the fact that these characters are alone together for the first time in this sort of story tells us this is the start of something and we can further infer from that that toru's acknowledgment of her hard work
means a lot more to Sakura than she lets on the characters helped the show with this show don't tell approach to their development by wearing their hearts on their sleeves for the most part you can always tell based on their expressions how they feel about any given development even if they try to hide it in fact their attempts to hide things only tell us more about what they're really banking the nature of its medium means the anime can't be quite as precise in illustrating these emotions as the manga is but bold evocative Direction allows it
to convey whatever infos lost to lower Fidelity through cinematic language as a result hori Mia doesn't need a running inner monologue to be fully understood and can instead use that device sparsely stylistically in contrast to its abundance of dialogue to convey when characters are feeling lonely or stuck up in their own heads of course none of that would work if the characters themselves weren't interesting and worth exploring in depth were the tired cliches simply used to acquaint us with more tired cliches they wouldn't amount to much at all Corey Mia states its Central thesis up
front that we all have sides of ourselves that we don't show the world and we're all looking for someone to share them with with every character makes good on that promise of hidden depth and Duality this cast doesn't fit neatly into your typical anime archetypes sure you could describe hori as a tsundere she does tend to bring out the bacas when romantically flustered and she's got a mean ax kick but she's not really defined by her anger she just has severe mood swings exacerbated by the day-to-day stress of being a surrogate mom to her younger
brother and a deep-rooted sense of separation anxiety that thus far only miyamura has ever been able to Abate she's not an anime Trope she's a neurotic teenage girl coping with the trauma of Parental Abandonment for his part crouching dweeb hidden himbo is a self-conscious bundle of raw nerves only just now emerging from a shell of shyness and pessimism that he's carried with him since grade school as a defense against bullying and exclusion push past those defenses and you'll find a kind easy going slightly clueless kid who's eager to help others and just happens to think
so lowly of himself that never bothering them or making them look bad by association with him is his go-to way of doing that thanks to shindo the concept of people actually liking him isn't totally foreign to Mia Mira anymore but he's still very much getting used to it he's clearly got a lot of pent-up anger too but he mostly directs it at himself we learn early on that those cool piercings are a product of self-harming impulses that said with the people he's closest to he is a little more willing to be brutally honest and let
his feelings loose and while he's not the type to start a fight Ishikawa [ __ ] around and finds out that he'll sure his [ __ ] finish one though again the motive Innovation for that conflict is ultimately rooted in miyamura's own diminished sense of self-worth speaking of toru the friendly jocular jock is a surprisingly sensitive guy prone to unseemly emotional outbursts at times but generally respectful of his friends feelings and willing to go out of his way to protect them once his initial jealousy toward Mia Mara subsides he really warms up to the gloomy
weirdo to the point that hori almost starts being jealous of him though the obliviously forward shindo poses more of an imaginary threat on that front Yuki yoshikawa their friend group's fourth member seems at first blush to be your typical Genki girl and is generally possessed of a positive outlook and go-getting disposition but she rarely if ever actually goes to get anything she really wants and tends to smile the hardest when there's something she really doesn't want to be asked about then there's the student council who had their own distinct Dynamics as a friend unit president
sengoku likes to play it cool but he's an anxious dork not so deep down and a not insignificant portion of that anxiety is traceable to his traumatic history as the violent Horizons childhood friend his girlfriend Remy seems flighty capricious and ditzy is in fact all of those things and perhaps a little overwhilling to joke about stealing boys from other girls but she loves him deeply nonetheless she's even dumber than Mi Amura and shindo in a lot of respects but she understands people well those closest to her best of all and tries her best to encourage
them to do their best Sakura has to pick up a lot of Remy's slack and the president's slack too but her bestie makes up for it by consistently affirming her self-worth and telling the insecure vice president how cute she really is which is really cute those seven form what I'd call the series main cast though that's a distinction made purely based on total screen time everywhere you look in horimia you'll find equally complex and compelling characters each of whom somehow makes you want to give him a big old hug some take longer to spark that
impulse than others but all deserve it when all said and done except for maybe kyosuke as much thought has gone into how these characters Express themselves and interact with each other as was spent shaping their inner worlds it feels like you could put them together in just about any combination and have comedy emerge from their chemistry especially if era or shindo are involved across the manga's many chapters you'll get to see just about every combo you can imagine and practice proves that theory out the anime doesn't really really have time for all of those diversions
it's a much more focused version of the story that optimizes the dramatic utility of these characters there are still plenty of laughs to be had it is a rom-com after all but just about every humorous aside that doesn't feed into a central character Arc in a meaningful way has been cut as have a few entire characters who don't really add much to the mix like a little girl from sota's class who's implied to have a budding crush on him a subplot about yoshikawa having a crush on street clothes miamura without realizing who he is also
gets the ax in the anime there are downsides to this approach big ones like a criminally significant reduction in Shu era's total screen time but he really makes the moments he still has count and I think the other omissions are for the better they probably could have kept that content in without making the show feel padded pushing back the crystallization of hori and miyamura's relationship by a few episodes to compensate but that would likely mean the anime wouldn't reach some of the manga's best moments and characters one of whom we just met last episode and
it would lay more narrative weight on the confession and response than they were really designed to Bear by extending the gap between them and drawing out the question of what the two really mean to each other those moments would simply hit different coming in episodes 6 or 8 out of 13 compared to four and five throwing off the delicate balance that sets the series apart from other romances hori Mia treats relationships not as goals for its characters to work toward but rather projects for them to work on together significant parts of their lives to be
sure but never the whole picture friendship status is often as essential to the stakes of the narrative as romantic drama if not more so and the growth of individual characters always matters most of all hori and miyamura aren't interesting because they love each other they're interesting in ways that result in them loving each other other characters are interesting in different ways that set them down different paths romantically academically and personally as I watch and obsessively binge read this series I don't find myself constantly thinking now kith like I do with a lot of my favorite
entries in this genre I just want to learn more about these characters and see where they end up wherever that is regardless of whether it results in romantic catharsis for me as a viewer some of the series strongest emotional moments like toru's reaction to his two best friends making it official are rooted in realistic understated heartbreak such moments often come right on the tail of the happiest story beats underscoring them with quiet sadness this isn't a series where the resolution of a romantic rivalry represents the Triumph of a good guy or girl over a duplicitous
villain it just means that two protagonists get to enjoy each other's company while another protagonist is left to suffer alone real relationships of all kinds are just messy like that we often cause each other undeserved yet unavoidable pain in pursuit of our own happiness or just by existing in proximity to each other with so many people in one place and all of their hormones out of whack High School represents the height of that aspect of human experience and horimia captures it perfectly finding a companion amid it all doesn't match magically set everything right it just
means that you've got someone to hold on to as you both weather the storm and that you have someone to laugh with when you can look back horimia is a love story built from mundane moments of intimacy and personal problems that seem bigger on the inside Atop A realistically Rocky Foundation of equally mundane generalized adolescent angst it's a story about looking past how the people around you present and seeing them for who they really are it's not particularly novel Innovative or subversive but it is true and honest in a way that all the best art
is we can see bits of ourselves and people we know not just in its main characters but all of them and the feeling of attachment that Fosters is what's kept its fan base coming back and growing across four iterations now mark my words like the webcom and manga that inspired it romance appreciators are going to be talking about and revisiting this anime for many years to come I'm Jeff THU professional [ __ ] bag signing out from my mother's basement [Music]
