Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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The girl-with-a-gimmick romcom is a staple of the modern seasonal anime environment. Several times a year, we are given the opportunity to watch an earnest but somewhat emotionally dim boy attempt to win the affections of a girl who has some standout quirky trait. Some of these traits are quirkier than others.

Being honest, I rarely touch this kind of thing. Occasionally, as in the case of My Dress-Up Darling, I will develop an affection for them because the characters work well together. Sometimes, as in The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, they are simply strange in a way that is only tangentially connected to their setup. A lot of the time, though, as in the case of say, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, I just find them vaguely grating, usually because the quirk isn’t actually that interesting. To go back to that comic we just mentioned, Shikimori, which began life as a Twitter comic, tried to hitch its entire series to the fact that Shikimori herself was nebulously masculine in some way, which mostly just meant that she was athletic and nominally good at keeping her extremely feminine boyfriend out of danger. The best parts of the series had nothing to do with her.

Since Shikimori, I’ve mostly avoided actually talking about these shows on this blog (again, with the exception of Glasses Girl, may it rest in Hell), because more than most anime, I’m keenly aware that I am way out of the target demographic of these things, which is teenage boys who are just discovering love and attraction for the first time. Most other popular genres of anime are also aimed at teenage boys, but most of these; battle shonen, for example, have a sizable peripheral demographic that also enjoy them, because things like “people with cool powers fight” transcend experience somewhat. In those cases, I’m at least somewhat a part of that periphery. That isn’t the case with gimmick romcoms. I’ve just never been able to get there.

Nonetheless, I’ve made an active effort this season toward pushing myself to write about things I’d normally pass over, and Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, alias Roshidere, is part of that. Ultimately, all of what I’ve called gimmicks when discussing these anime are actually aspects of some kind of romantic (and/or sexual) fantasy. You want an otaku girlfriend, you tune in to Dress-Up Darling. You want a cool girlfriend who’s more assertive than you, you put on Shikimori. You want a weird baby-creature that looks like she was drawn by an alien, you watch The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses. All of this is pretty straightforward, and Roshidere centers a trope that’s so obvious that I’m a little shocked I’ve never seen one of these anime use it as their main thing before; the fantasy of dating the hot foreign chick in your class. Most classes in my experience do not actually have hot foreign chicks, but having been a boy up to a certain point, I can attest that unfortunately, teenage boys will make do by being exoticizing weirdos about almost anyone who looks different from them. Thankfully for the basic palatability of this show, Kuze Masachika [Amasaki Kouhei] does not have to be an exoticizing weirdo. He is our lead character, and, quite unlike every teenage boy I personally knew growing up, the hot foreign girl in his class is actually interested in him. (The Hot Foreign Girl In My Class is Actually Interested in Me?! would be a workable alternate title for this anime. I’m glad it’s not called that because its real title is better, but in a nearby reality that’s just slightly worse than ours, that’s the name of the show I’m writing about today.)

Alisa Mikhailovna Kujou [major Russophile Uesaka Sumire, in what I must imagine is a dream role], nicknamed Alya, is our title character. She thinks Kuze, a complete nerd who spends his time playing gacha games and watching late-night anime, is pretty cute. It’s easy to be uncharitable about this kind of series, and I think I’ve been a bit hard on them so far, so I want to head an easy non-criticism off at the pass; this is not “proof that the writer has never talked to a woman” or whatever in of itself. I met my girlfriend on a message board because we were talking about Gundam 00, and our case is far from unique. Girls can like nerdy guys, and given who this series was written by and for, it makes complete sense that Alya is one such girl. To give her further credit, while Kuze does not have the most striking design in the world, he’s passingly handsome, fairly funny, and is considerate of others’ feelings. Together, the two have a nice, snarky repartee going. As the viewer, I can put myself enough in her shoes to understand what she sees in him.

Our basic premise is very simple here. These two sit next to each other in class. Alya is very straight-laced and is on the student council. Kuze is an otaku who doesn’t give much a damn about school. They have a lot of comedic back and forth. Kuze will do something foolish or nerdy; fall asleep during a chemistry lesson, start playing a gacha game during a between-class break, etc. Alya will chastise him, and they will have some mildly witty exchange. After which she will say something to herself in Russian that reveals her true feelings, hence the show’s title. So far, so simple, and even on this level the two do have a nice little rhythm going. But there’s a complication; unbeknownst to Alya, Kuze also speaks Russian. He can’t bring himself to actually admit this, because he assumes Alya would be deathly embarrassed that Kuze knows that she’s been calling him a cutie or what-have-you in another language this entire time. It’s a fun little dynamic, and it comes off as a bit of a lightly Kaguya-sama-inspired element in that it makes a sort of layered mind game thing (albeit one with very low stakes) part of the narrative. The two aren’t explicitly thinking of this as a race to make the other person confess their feelings first, but there’s something loosely like that happening as a result of this twist.

(Incidentally, I’ve decided this deserves an entire parenthetical aside. When Kuze is rolling on the gacha in something that’s clearly Fate Grand Order, he pulls the in-universe game’s version of Tsukuyomi, who looks basically identical to Alya aside from having fox ears. Alya questions the design, wondering why she has silver hair, and Kuze replies that it’s probably an allusion to the color of the Moon, but brushes the question off as unimportant because the fact that she’s cute matters more. Alya mutters to herself, in Russian, that she has silver hair too, and calls him a “cheater.” This matters to me because it’s a rather rare example of an anime explicitly calling attention to, and confirming the in-universe reality of, unconventional hair colors. This is maybe the most fascinating thing in the show, and I don’t say that as an insult. It’s especially odd because most of the other characters have very realistic hair tones. Before she said that line, I assumed her silver-white hair was intended to be a stylized blonde and didn’t really question it. A later scene even implies that this might actually be the case, so, what gives? It doesn’t ultimately matter, but it will distract me. Anime hair color is one of those things that is just endlessly interesting to me.)

A recurring thought I had while watching this is that both Kuze and Alya struggle to honestly express themselves, and in attempting to do so, lapse into extremely goofy behavior, hiding their feelings not so much in any specific language but in jokes, and just generally screwing around with each other. Sometimes this is cute, sometimes this sees the show lapse into shameless cliché. Something that very much teeters on the edge is the requisite Fanservice Bit, here toward the end of the episode, where the situation contrives itself such that Alya is sitting with one of her stockings removed in a classroom that only herself and Kuze are present in. She teases him (again) and things end with the camera spending way too much time on her foot and a panty shot that was so sudden that it felt like a jumpscare. (She also kicks him in the face, but that’s a lot less surprising.) I’m not going to criticize the show just for attempting to be salacious, but there’s something about the integration of it into the other material that feels jarring. Then again, as I keep saying, I’m not the horny teenage boy that this kind of thing is aimed at anymore. I dimly remember being like that, a period of my life where I would’ve defended Love Hina to the death as an important work of art because there’s, like, dude, there’s totally a scene where you can see Motoko in a hot spring, but not only is it hard to return to that mentality some 15 years later, I don’t really have any desire to. Does this stuff work for its target audience? I have no idea, if it does, good for them. I don’t wanna see Alya’s feet.

On the other hand, that light mind game element is still present even during this scene, and I think if they had played the whole thing a little more subtly it might have felt a little less out of place. In the middle of all this, and in between freaking out about Girl Legs, Kuze has a stray thought where he basically psychoanalyzes Alya and tries to get to the bottom of why she’s doing this whole muttering-in-Russian thing in the first place. Are his conclusions correct? Who knows! But I like that even during what’s probably its scene that is most easy to object to, the show still treats Alya as a character.

On the other other hand, there are also areas where the show feels more like it’s objectifying Alya, and really the female half of the cast in general, than treating them like people.¹ During a scene in the school cafeteria, one of Kuze’s friends, a kid with a shaved head named Maruyama Takeshi [Sakai Koudai], is a fountain of what sometimes gets called locker room talk. He talks about Alya and two other characters and how badly he wishes he had a shot with them, he ranks the three, preferring Kuze’s childhood friend Suou Yuki [Maruoka Wakana], and just generally acts like an ass. My initial impression was that we were supposed to sort of think this guy was a loser. In light of the scene described above, and just the fact that Roshidere lingers on this guy’s yapping for so long, I’m less sure. This, to me, was much grosser than the whole foot thing. A series does not need to explicitly condemn characters like this in order to be good, but in context with everything else, it does make me see Roshidere in a slightly less charitable light.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I can appreciate a fair number of aspects of this show, certainly. I haven’t talked much about its presentation, but said presentation is quite solid. “A high school” is perhaps the most ISO standard setting in anime, but Roshidere‘s feels distinct and has a genuine sense of place. This is also true of the flashback scenes, late in the episode, that depict a young Kuze hanging out with a person who is probably a young Alya in a park at dusk. The “chase sequence” that ends the episode is also pretty strikingly directed and animated, and I’ll admit to being a sucker for strong action sequences in non-action shows. It feels worth noting as well that the OP is a ridiculous, incredibly elaborate thing that promises all sorts of fantastical scenarios that, barring some sort of full-on genre shift (wouldn’t that be interesting), we will never get in the show itself. The ED—apparently one of twelve, they’re giving this the Monogatari treatment—is similarly grandiose. These sequences are fun on their own, but their presence feels telling, in a way, as though the story’s actual charms weren’t quite considered enough to carry it. (Some might remember I had basically the same thought with regard to Shikimori‘s elaborate fantasy OP. These two shows come from some of the same people at Doga Kobo, which may have something to do with it.)

On the writing side, I like a majority of Alya and Kuze’s dynamic, and some of the ancillary characters seem like they’ll eventually be fun to follow even if Takeshi is absolutely unbearable. I bring all this up to say, I might actually finish this! It’s entirely possible I don’t, we have a busy season ahead of us and most of what I’m looking forward to the most still hasn’t premiered, but it’s not impossible. Even if I do, though, this series isn’t for me, to an even greater degree than most of what I cover on this site. So I again have to come back to my keen awareness that what I think of it just doesn’t matter that much. Ultimately what I specifically think of any anime doesn’t matter that much. (If it did, Healer Girl would be widely hailed as a modern classic.) Still, much more than usual, I find myself with a shortage of strong opinions here. I’m sure it will do fine in a broader sense. But will it appear on Magic Planet Anime again? Who knows, stranger things have happened.

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^{1: Some people would read this line and ask, “isn’t that what every anime like this does?” To which I would reply no, it really is not.}

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