I do realize that there are many many many great anime out there that I have yet to experience. And I also acknowledge that if I don't really like an anime I can just drop it. I further acknowledge that my taste has become trash because I just watch whatever gets put in front of me. Now that we've addressed all of my various shortcomings in the world of anime, shall we discuss Koi wa Ameagari no You ni otherwise known as After the Rain?
{Spoilers}
In terms of atmosphere and setting the mood, the show is very successful. It's got this rainy day aesthetic where it's always almost about to rain, in the midst of raining, or just after the rain...as the title of the show would suggest. As a self-proclaimed pluviophile, I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the show!
Alright, to start my short synopsis of the show, it would be something along the lines of: there's this girl named Tachibana that's a junior in high school who used to be on the track and field team until she experienced a horrible injury to her Achilles tendon. In despair over her injury, she finds refuge on a rainy day in a cafe/family diner where she encounters its middle aged manager that cheers her up with some cheap magic trick. From then on, she falls in love with the cafe's manager Kondou and works part time there in lieu of after school track activities. The story mainly follows these two and Tachibana's honestly taboo love for the manager who's deep in the middle ages of his life at 45. However, I think it went in a different direction than I was expecting. I was expecting the manager to be kind of reckless and accept Tachibana's love as some sort of honor like "oh I've still got it and I can date a high school girl even though this is blatant pedophilia." However, the show takes a twist on this expectation of mine and instead replaces it with this clumsy love that I can almost support. Tachibana herself is a little socially awkward, not being of many words but having a truly kind heart. The manager is kind of the same, a very sweet and soft-spoken guy that according to Nishida, another waitress at the diner, kind of stinks lol. He kind of gives off the vibes of a pushover that just lets everyone walk all over him. For the first part of the show, he stays as this confusing object of Tachibana's love, but even his backstory is explored. In the past he was a college student with big dreams of being a novelist, but life got in the way and he ended up divorced and the manager of a diner, too scared to write anymore and disappoint his younger self. When he encounters his old college friend Kujou who acts as a foil for his character, being almost everything that Kondou isn't.
By the end of it, I think the relationship between the two of them as well as everyone surrounding them pushed them to revitalize their dreams and chase after them. We left off at a bit of an ambiguous ending in terms of if Kondou and Tachibana ever get together, but it was a bittersweet kind of ending that I really didn't mind.
Overall, I would say it was visually very beautiful. It's the kind of anime that I see a lot of those people who make AMVs and compilation videos pulling from. In terms of actual content though, it was pretty slow and soft-spoken, if you could use human attributes to describe anime and not be weird lol. I'd say there's definitely a market for this kind of thing, especially if you're looking for some kind of age gap anime or some pseudo-romance type of thing. However, I wasn't absolutely blown away.
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