Aharen-san is a short, stoic looking school girl who has problems judging distances, both physical and more metaphoric ones. Raido is a big guy with unfriendly eyes who sits next to her. Together they fight crim^w^w fall in love. Maybe.
A twelve episode series based on a gag manga that ran in the spring 2022 season. You may think that the joke her is how the tiny Aharen-san continually keeps misjudging her distance to Raido, either physically or how she behaves around him, but that’s only part of it. The other part is that Raido, for all he looks almost as stoic as Aharen-san herself, is actualy an incredible goofball given to enormous flights of fancies as he tries to understand what she’s doing. And because we see everything from Raido each time we’re taken along on his delusions only to come crashing down to Earth alongside him in the end. It’s all done very deadpan and without the usual anime habit of drawing too much attention to the joke so that you’re sure it is a joke. As for the peculiarities of Aharen-san, we’re discovering them alongside Raido, never seeing things from her point of view. It’s an interesting formula, with each episode having two or more stories or incidents following this pattern, not always connected to each other.
It’s also a formula that lends itself better to weekly viewing than binging, to be fair. Try and binge it and you’d get irritated by the repetition sooner rather than later. Even with the cast being extended quite early on in the series, with some of Aharen-san’s family being introduced, as well as certain school friends, the core formula stays the same as Raido slowly gets to know his tiny seat mate. I enjoyed its slow pace and gentle humour, but honestly this was also the series I ended off drifting of to the most this year. Animation wise, this was a perfectly cromulent series, often better than it needed to be, with some nice subtle character animation in places. If you like a slow paced, laidback romcom with not too much at stake, this is a series for you.
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