Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou

OH. MY. GOSH. I just finished Danshi Koukousei no Nichijou in three days, and I'm still reeling from the laughter coma. I've seen some wild anime in my time, but this one? It's the real MVP. I'm talking laugh-so-hard-you-snort-your-coffee-out-your-nose, cry-tears-of-joy, and clutch-your-belly-in-agony laughter.

The characters? FORGET ABOUT IT. They're all so ridiculously lovable! Tadakuni's straight-man reactions, Yoshitake's... well, Yoshitake's existence, and Hidenori's non-stop shenanigans? I'm dead. I mean, who wouldn't want to hang out with these goofballs?

And can we talk about how relatable it all is? I mean, who hasn't had those ridiculous conversations or gotten themselves into some absurd mess? It's like the creators bottled ... up all the best (worst?) parts of high school and turned them into comedic gold.

But what really takes the cake is the romance – or should I say, the attempt at romance? It's like they're trying to be serious, but their ridiculous personalities keep getting in the way. The unrequited loves, misunderstandings, and clueless moments? I mean, who needs swoony moments when you can have laugh-out-loud, snort-your-coffee-out-your-nose humor?

Not a single episode disappointed me – I was giggling like a maniac from start to finish. I even found myself yelling "THIS IS MY LIFE!" at the screen (sorry, neighbors!).

So yeah, 10/10. Would watch again. And again. And maybe again. If you haven't seen it, drop everything and go binge it. Your abs (and your sanity) will thank you.

My introduction to this was once seeing clips of this on YouTube a long time ago. It involved clips of Yassan by the river. It seemed so full of potential based on these clips. A lot of my favorite anime are comedic slice of life manga adaptations like this one. The title encapsulates exactly the kind of thing I want out of an anime. The comedic in the mundane.

Finally getting around to the show it had a promising start. This seems like a nitpick but the outro really vibed me out a lot. It got to a point where I would stop the episode at ... the outro, forgetting there are skits after it. In the middle of this series it just seemed like the vignettes all centered around bullying different characters. It wasn't entertaining to watch. It wasn't funny to me.

That's most of the negatives. I liked the characters and the style. Half of the male characters aren't memorable but I think that's okay. They mainly serve as props for the comedy (or the other stuff). The characters that do stand out I quite liked and the others sometimes stood out. I feel like improvements could have been made in this area but it's fine. When the show is funny it is quite funny.

In conclusion the show didn't wow me much but it was funny. If the middle episodes were better I would've rated this higher. It's uneven but more than half of it was good. I would revisit this show over one I hold more sacred because I wouldn't mind to wear this one out. But I would skip the outro for it. One last point about that. It's not like I disliked the idea of it, just something about it personally bothered me. Maybe the detachment it has.

Maybe expecting this to be anything even similar to Nichijou was a big mistake, but I had hoped this anime would be something similar to it. Still, I think there's a lot of appeal in just reliving the high school days and the unique experiences it allowed us to have with friends. And I got none of that with this anime. For a final comparison to Nichijou, despite it being insanely more whacky and outlandish, I found it way more relatable than this anime.

Daily Life of High School Boys is really frustrating because it continues to be on the cusp of something fun and ... relatable. But my hopes really started to die away by the first episode. I thought it was charming that the characters would just decide to randomly pretend they were in an RPG regardless of how dumb they looked, and I think that's an important quality to highlight. High school can often be a time when we try to hide and abandon our true selves and/or our favorite hobbies for fear that it may make us look dumb to our peers. So, a true friendship where they can just do what they want is great. One thing I liked about this anime was the real sense of friendship. At first, I thought the student council might in some way be the antagonists or bullies to our trio, but they're not. They make jabs at each other, but at the end of the day, they're friends, and it's very refreshing.
But here in lies the problem. As nice as it is to be reminded we can have fun regardless of how we're judged, they do it near constantly. They really can seem like elementary school kids at times. And shouldn't have taken up the bulk of the scenarios. Unless this is just what theater kids do to kill time? I remember playing RPGs with my friends over, and we'd make up our own silly voices for the characters as we played and had a lot of fun in that, so there's definitely something nostalgic it could have tapped into, but it missed its mark.

Now for the comedy itself. I probably exhaled air about 5 times during the whole run of this series. There are some "cute" jokes in this that I found mildly amusing, and that's about it. Episode 1 was probably the funniest, mainly because you don't know yet that the series will never try to stray from the very simple jokes. And that's just it; the show is safe and doesn't really try to make a lot of unique jokes. And unfortunately, when they do make a good joke, it's oftentimes that they just drag it out too long, and it loses any punch it had. I enjoyed the joke about the characters slipping into puddles, but after the 2nd or 3rd time, you know what to expect; there's no subversion anymore. Repeating the joke does not make it funnier. Then a lot of the time I can barely even identify the joke. I understand the show can be very lowkey, but it's to the point where I can't even figure out where I'm supposed to laugh. There were a lot of times a scene would end, and all I was left to think was, "ok..." and it gets hard to watch that over and over again.

Characters: I'm gonna say it straight off the bat: I really do not like the way basically any of the female characters are written. Yassan is fun, and Ringo is cute and probably the best-written of them, but that's about it. I get it. It's an anime about high school boys, but I get weird objectification vibe from them. I hated the skit where the entire point was just to look up Ringo's skirt, and that's the entire joke. I don't care if they feel ashamed afterward; that's something you don't do. The other girls are just really annoying. They all attack the boys for literally no reason. The scene where they try to shave Motoharu's beard is so weird? Like this literal toddler-type behavior, it's so weird. I'm not asking for these girls to act like your typical dere girls because I'd probably hate them even more, but it's just weird how randomly hostile and loud literally all of them are. There were some real missed opportunities. I liked that at the start, Motoharu seemed to have a great relationship with his sister, which was a bit healthier than most siblings, but then she also turned out to be crazy. It would have been a nice example to show that it's cool to have a great friendship with your sister. Something, again, can easily be made fun of in high school. Anyway, the post-credit funky high school girls... They're super obnoxious, and they don't end up tying into anything by the end, purely pointless. All they do is try to make themselves more appealing to boys, which, again, goes back to that weird objectification. It's taken to the 11th degree, so sure, it's still comedy, but it's just awkward. Plus, they make the same K-on movie joke twice, which is wild to see them just casually not address.
The guys aren't much better, they're all so bland and they all blend into each other. I thought the main trio was gonna be fun to bounce off each other at first, but then they barely showed up together for the entire series, and I think that led to a lot of the show suffering because I think a decent dynamic could have been built off of them. It was annoying going into a lot of the different skits because you first had to try and figure out how the characters would react to each other. A lot of comedy revolves around you knowing the characters and their personalities; personalities bounce off each other, and that's what makes for some fun dynamics. So when you don't know what boy A thinks of boy B then you just sit there and watch the joke blandly play out.

Lastly, art and music. The art is really bland. Some of the characters look cute, but most of them are average. Some of them look really ugly, some unintentional. I think it was more of a time crunch thing vs anything else, but still, there are a lot of not great shots in this. Because of this blandness, it makes it even harder to determine who's who unless they have some obvious distinguishing factor. Why do the student council boys look so similar to the main trio? There's no point. The girls aren't good either, a lot of them have very similar hair styles so a lot of the time, the characters had to directly say who they were before I understood anything. Also really hated how basically all the girls didn't have eyes. Except for Ringo and Yassan. Just why? It got pretty distracting and only made telling them apart harder. And for the music, it was pretty annoying. So much of it was repeated throughout the series, and it gets grating, especially the skit transition music. A lot of the music I wouldn't mind I think it sounds fine, and I actually like the heavy use of electric guitar, but there's not enough variety. The OP and ED are fiiiine. The ED has a weird charm to it for me, but I know that's just my incredibly weird tastes in music saying that, and to the average person would probably find it rather eargrating.

Anyway, this anime is crazy mid, don't watch it. It's just a waste of time.