r/Horimiya

I just finished the anime and the only thing I can say is wow, I started with romance animes recently and I saw a few and I liked it a lot but Horimiya is a lot more like slice of life and I love it, all the characters and it's charisma is amazing, and I love the main couple and how not everything is about them, there are a lot of other characters and is perfect, I will probably reed the manga soon.

Can anyone recommend me an anime like Horimiya? I mean a slice of life with a bit of romance, or just slice of life I don't care I just love that genre

Something that feels comfy like horimiya, and isn't a bunch of will-they-won't-they

So I've been on a romance anime kick for the past couple of months, which led me to Horimiya. I've heard it called one of the great anime romances of the past decade, so I wanted to see what it was like. But seven episodes in, I'm not understanding what the hype was about. It might be a matter of personal taste, sure, but I'm feeling like there might be more to it than that and wanted to run my thoughts by the collective to check. Maybe I missed something important or I'm not looking at it the right way.

A quick explanation of what I understand about the series: Horimiya is a slice-of-life romance story about the budding relationship between Kyoko Hori and Izumi Miyamura, who are high school classmates. One aspect of their early relationship is that both of them have two sides (or so the characters and the show description say - more on that in a bit). At school, Hori is a popular, outgoing girl and Miyamura is a quiet, gloomy boy, while outside of school, Hori is an intense, family-loving girl and Miyamura is a stereotypical bad boy with lots of piercings. They discover each other's secret sides by chance, find that they both enjoy each other's company and the exclusivity of knowing each other in ways that others do not, and gradually fall in love.

Except... that's not really what I've been getting out of it. Maybe it's a cultural difference between Japanese social norms and my native American ones, but Hori and Miyamura don't seem all that different to me at school and at home.

For example, the show description and the characters themselves say that Hori is more outwardly emotional at school and shouts a lot, but I rewatched the first episode and she's just as quiet and sweet at home as she is at school. The first time she actually shouts out loud is right after Miyamura tells her about how different her two sides are - a trait she hadn't displayed before then. Before then, she'd only cleaned up the house a bit, picked her brother up from school, and gotten privately excited about a sale on eggs. While it's true she's more family-oriented at home, that's not that surprising since she doesn't have any family members at school to be homey around.

And Miyamura is even more confusing - he's basically the same soft-spoken, gentle guy in both places, just with a different personal style (piercings and his hair done up) outside of school. He's not a "bad boy" in behavior at all - just style.

So aside from Miyamura's piercings, neither one of them seems all that different to me. If they are, it's so subtle I'm not picking up on it even when I'm looking for it.

The other big thing I heard about Horimiya is that it's a realistic, wholesome romance unafflicted by the plot tumors so common in other anime romances. The main couple get together fairly quickly (episode 4) rather than puttering around in will-they-won't-they forever and they have a genuine affection for one another rather than fighting a lot. It's true that they get together pretty fast (though the series does only have 13 episodes, not counting The Missing Pieces midquel bits), it didn't take all that long for them to have the tired old "I saw you walking with another girl so explain yourself" argument (episode 5). I'm not all the way through yet, so maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to be running about as healthily as your average anime slice-of-life romance, with dumb drama instead of confidence and trust.

Normally, I'd just write this off as a difference in taste, but I just feel like there's something else I'm not getting. I don't mind realistic romances or wholesome relationships (I love You and I Are Polar Opposites) or grounded slice-of-life settings (I love Toradora!). It's just that the series description and the words of the Redditors whose praise drew me to the show in the first place and the show I've been watching are two different shows, or that the show is much more subtle than I'm used to. So for now, I'm just not getting what makes Horimiya the special series I've heard praised so widely.