Hitoribocchi no Marumaru Seikatsu Review Episode 8

Another friend quest begun.

Episode 8

Bocchi is back at school for the second semester in episode 8 of Hitoribocchi.

Most things haven’t changed. She’s still friends with Nako and Aru and the ninja girl is still her apprentice but wants to be friends but doesn’t want to ask. Yet, the contrived goal of this series is for Bocchi to befriend everyone in the class and so begins her latest quest to befriend Kurai, though I’ve yet to see any reason why you’d want to be friends with her given almost every word out of her mouth is a criticism.

So we get back to the problem of the central premise. As much as slice of life stories about shy girls making friends can work beautifully, the artificial instigation of this friend quest through Bocchi’s actual friend just cutting her off until she succeeded, looms over the entire story. In any class there are going to be people you just won’t get on with or don’t like and yet the condition insists she makes friends with everyone regardless.

Doesn’t that seem a little forced and more importantly, won’t that make a lot of those friendships fake or shallow?

That kind of makes it hard to get behind Bocchi, as does the lack of development and depth to her character. We get she’s shy and anxious but they’ve given us no reason for the extreme nature of her social anxiety and while I’m happy to concede some people are just socially awkward, the exaggerated nature of Bocchi’s social dysfunction (with no one apparently willing to call her out on it) genuinely makes it hard to get drawn into this story.

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While this isn’t the worst show I’ve continued with this season, it is the one I’m having the least fun watching and the twenty minutes this week was more of the same with the minor highlight of watching Bocchi run away while jumping over imaginary hurdles to psyche herself up. That was actually pretty cute and funny.