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.

We’ve all heard this story before, although maybe not in a long time. Introverted teenager falls in love with popular music genre at a young age, grabs an instrument and devotes their life to becoming the next Joe Strummer (or whoever). The history of rock n’ roll in Japan is long and winding, and frankly something I’m only passingly familiar with, but the general notion remains the same across national boundaries and across time. You hear the ring of the guitar chord and the roar of the crowds, and you want that; who wouldn’t?

Lots of people have wanted that, and BOCCHI THE ROCK! is not remotely the first anime to tackle that idea, even if the full-band anime as a format has been mostly dead for years at this point. (I once saw someone jokingly describe the genre as “idol anime where you can hear the bass.” They were being silly, but I think that the comparison exists at all speaks to how rare these things have become.) But Bocchi the Rock is not BECK for the same reason that Bump of Chicken aren’t The Clash. Time and space change both the ends and the means; Bocchi the Rock has a lot more in common with Hitori Bocchi, another anime, from a few years back, that uses the same pun on the Japanese phrase for “all alone”, than it does most older music anime. Except, of course, for K-On!, whose modern classic status is as easily argued for by how easily its lasting influence has bridged the gap between these once very different formats than anything about the series itself. (Which is good, because K-On! remains probably the most high-profile anime from the new ’10s that I haven’t seen.)

The chief conceit of Bocchi the Rock is that our title character—real name Hitori Goto (Yoshino Aoyama), nickname “Bocchi”—wants to melt faces with the sheer sun-like power of her guitar wizardry. Preferably, to audiences of thousands. But she’s deeply introverted, which makes that hard. I would go farther and say she is perhaps the character I’ve seen in an anime who most obviously has some sort of severe social anxiety, of every anime I’ve seen full stop. And yes, I am including the title character of the aforementioned Hitori Bocchi.

Bocchi being not just introverted but socially anxious is an important point to me. It will not surprise you to learn that I, nearly 30 and making a half-living by running a blog about cartoons, also have pretty severe social anxiety. In general, I talk to my roommates and very few other people on a day-to-day basis. I have not simply “gone out with friends” in a casual way to have fun since high school or so. I’m not remotely unique in this case, and I have made some steps to try to remedy this in the past year or two, but I bring it up because this makes me very sensitive to how socially anxious characters are portrayed in media. Maybe overly so.

All this to say; I was pleasantly surprised by how well Hitori’s anxiety is handled. It very much is a source of comedy, but that doesn’t inherently make it unsympathetic or reductive of that trait. It’s a frequent source of jokes among people who are socially anxious that our mental illness seems to think the world operates in some truly strange ways, and there is an element of that in Hitori’s particular headsnakes. The plot proper kicks off when she’s recruited to play guitar for a small band, initially as a pickup member but, by the end of the episode, apparently permanently. This is great for her, since her extreme shyness cuts badly against her desire to be a guitar hero.

Hitori, proud owner of a 30K subs Youtube channel (also called “guitarhero.” Really.) where she does guitar covers, thinks she’s up for the challenge. She isn’t; playing by yourself isn’t the same as playing in a group, and Hitori gets flatly told that she sucks.

Crumpling in the face of something she thought she could do but finds out she can’t—I’ve been there—she almost literally shrinks into a chibi, and the series slams us in the face with what is certainly the funniest fake credits gag I’ve seen in years.

^{I can’t believe Hitori Goto is fucking dead.}

A side note; some praise should be given to Aoyama’s voice acting here; she dips into a growly, lower register for Hitori’s more depressed (or outrageous) inner thoughts, and easily flips to a flat, emotive-by-being-unemotive diction for Hitori’s actual speech. It’s an interesting contrast and gives the character a lot of personality.

As for Hitori sucking, things get better. The also fairly inexpressive Ryo (Saku Mizuno) gets the idea to have Hitori perform while inside a cardboard box. This is, purposefully, very stupid, and it doesn’t really help in any meaningful way. But it does get Hitori—newly christened “Bocchi” by Ryo, and ecstatic to get her first-ever nickname—through the group’s first concert. Have I mentioned yet that the band is basically called “The Zip Ties”? A terrible name in any language, as commented upon by their third member, Nijika (Sayumi Suzushiro). I kind of love it. In any case, through a combination of the box idea and the other two girls offhandedly mentioning how much they like that mysterious guitarhero youtube channel (Hitori is too giddy to actually mention that she runs it. That’s a reveal for the future, presumably), they’re able to get out there, and they do in fact play their first show, in a scuffed little underground club called Starry.

The episode ends on an interesting, rather nonstandard note for this sort of thing. We don’t get to see the band’s performance at all, depriving us of the usual “surprisingly good first performance of the show” sequence. The whole cardboard box tactic hasn’t really accomplished much, and it remains very much to be seen how, exactly, Hitori will actually overcome her problems. But things are on an upward trajectory, and that’s mostly what counts.

I do fear I’ve made the show sound rather dramatic. It really isn’t; it’s a fairly standard slice of life comedy with a mildly melancholic outer edge, but I would be truly shocked if this twelve-episode run does not end with the band—who will hopefully have a better name by then—performing in front of some crowd somewhere. Hitori’s anxiety is the core of her character, but there is ample room for her to grow beyond it, and I really would love to see that. In any case, she exits the episode in the most me_irl way possible.

^{Someone tell her about spoons theory, please.}

I should also at least passingly mention the series’ visual element. The show’s direction comes to us from CloverWorks‘ Keiichirou Saitou. This isn’t literally his first directorial project (he’s previously done a one-episode OVA), but it’s his first full series, so I’m interested to see if some of the more unusual touches here, particularly the more offbeat camera angles, will be ironed out or reinforced as the show gets further along. As far as the visuals in hobby comedies go this season, it’s still firmly in second place behind Do It Yourself!!, but that’s not a bad spot to be in.

As for Hitori, there is something to be said for the fact that it doesn’t seem to occur to her that by having made friends—or hell, at least friendly acquaintances—she’s already taken a huge first step. My hope is that Bocchi the Rock continues along this same path; I don’t mind laughing at Hitori—it’s not unlike laughing at myself, really—but I do also want to see her grow as a person. Part of the magic of any series based around a performing art is seeing the characters grow into these dreams that they have. By the end of this episode, I wanted to see Bocchi performing on stage, too. So, keep raising your skinny fists, girl in a box; the stage is yours to take.

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