3D Kanojo: Real Girl Episode 3: The Outsider's Perspective

Despite the missteps, this anime has something that makes it oddly interesting to watch. What did you think of episode 3?

It is quite clear that Tsutsui isn’t the ideal male protagonist. He isn’t even a particularly likeable or sympathetic geek character. Yet for all his faults, there’s something kind of interesting about watching such an incredibly awkward guy slowly stumbling his way into developing an actual social circle. That isn’t to say that I suddenly want everything to work out for him as some of his actions are still kind of eye-roll worthy and self-indulgent, but for anyone who has ever wondered what they should do about a situation, or not gotten a social cue, or experienced an emotion and not known what to do with it, there are moments where a connection can be made. Moments. It isn’t exactly consistent.

The really interesting part about the developing social circle is it put a focus onto one of his classmate’s relationships. As much as Iroha and Tsutsui are a cute kind of couple, there’s a time-limit and some real awkwardness still there. Still, seeing how they viewed the crush and ultimately how the two of them ended up dealing with the emotional fall-out was actually a nice moment for this series.

I’m not going to sing the praises of this one as it is definitely problematic but I like the look of the anime, I like the characters or find them interesting enough to want to know more about them, and the occasional well developed moment raises this up enough that I think I’ll make it through the season.

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Thanks for reading.

Karandi James