Bloom Into You Episode 1: It’s Very Pink

Posted on by Karandi
Bloom Into You Episode 1

Please note: Bloom Into You was reviewed for patrons only after episode 1 and posts do require a password to access. Please consider supporting the blog and becoming a patron to unlock content.

This first episode is pretty, well paced, and just nicely executed and yet I found myself just a little bit bored by the midway point. It is another case of a story that will probably be excellent but just really doesn’t interest me. That said, I am going to give Bloom Into You at least one more episode before I decide because what is presented here is very nice.

Bloom Into You Episode 1

Yuu is probably my biggest problem with the show so far and that isn’t actually because there’s anything wrong with her as a protagonist. It is more that she’s exactly the kind of female character I just do not connect with. She’s indecisive and easily lead, slow to react and generally pushed around at the pace of other characters. We meet her as she’s brimming with indecision about how to tell the boy who confessed to her a month ago that she doesn’t want to date him (that decision at least she’d made). But she’s also dithering about what club if any to join at school or whether to talk to her friends about her love life. It’s all just very much not the kind of female character I enjoy watching.

Bloom Into you Episode 1
This image very much reminded me of March Comes in Like a Lion and a number of other anime that have used similar imagery. Bloom Into You is very pretty visually and scenes like this were lovely.

At the suggestion of her teacher she agrees to go check out the student council and there she meets Nanami. Yuu catches Nanami getting confessed to and sees how easily she turns the guy down and is somehow impressed that someone can express an opinion. That said, it isn’t insta-love as we then see Yuu’s growing respect for Nanami before she asks for advice on how to deal with the boy she needs to reject. And it isn’t Yuu who ends up falling in love but Nanami who confesses to Yuu leading to a whole new round of indecisive confusion, though at least it seems kind of warranted.

Bloom Into You Episode 1

Actually, none of Yuu’s indecision would have bothered me as much except that in the flash back we get of Yuu talking to the boy when they were still just friends, she’s like an entirely different person. How her friends haven’t noticed that somehow her personality has completely changed course in the last month is beyond me and if it hasn’t, then that flash back was pretty misleading.

Bloom Into You Episode 1

That said, it is an interesting enough set up to explore the idea of love in general and love between girls. There’s plenty of potential here and I’ve already read quite a lot of positive first impressions from people who have read the source so this one is probably going to have quite a following this season. I’ll see how I’m feeling about it after episode 2 but it just isn’t my kind of thing so far.