Shizuku Mizutani cares about nothing except her grades; Haru Yoshida has a reputation for violence and hasn't shown up to class in months. A teacher's errand — having Shizuku drop off the handouts he's missed — puts the two of them in a room together, and the show doesn't waste time after that: their push-and-pull dynamic is established almost as soon as they meet, so there's no slow build before the actual premise kicks in. What follows is less consistent. A stretch of episodes through the middle plays more like a series of standalone classroom situations than a story building toward anything specific, and several supporting characters get handed heavy backstory — old grudges, feelings never said out loud — that the remaining runtime simply doesn't have space to resolve. The central relationship, meanwhile, tends to move in a repeating pattern rather than a straight line: closeness, a misunderstanding, distance, a reset. That works fine the first couple of times; by the later episodes it starts to feel like the show is treading water instead of moving its two leads anywhere new. Then there's the ending, and it doesn't get any benefit of the doubt here: the anime wrapped its run well before the source manga had reached its own conclusion, so a genuine finish was never actually on the table. That's context, not an excuse — taken purely as a finished season of television, the last episode and the OVA tacked on after it don't resolve so much as stop moving. Threads the show spent real time setting up are simply left where they were. Anyone going in expecting the story to actually end should adjust expectations now. The two leads are the reason this show works at all. Shizuku runs on flat, efficient logic and treats emotional messiness as something to manage rather than feel; Haru reacts first and sorts out what he means afterward, with almost no gap between feeling something and saying it out loud. To its credit, the show frames their constant miscommunication as a genuine mismatch in how these two process emotion in the first place, not as ordinary shyness — a sharper hook than most shows in this genre bother reaching for. Whatever the plot is technically doing in a given episode, put these two alone in a scene and it's reliably the best thing happening on screen. The comedy leans the same direction, working through dialogue and timing rather than physical gags, which suits a show this talky. The supporting cast is more uneven — a couple of characters get enough space to feel like real people, while the rest mostly function as delivery devices, there to move a scene along and then step back. And when the show reaches for something heavier — isolation, a family that doesn't function, what "normal" is even supposed to mean — it rarely stays there for long; a scene or two later it's back to broad comedy, which plays less like deliberate tonal range and more like the show retreating from its own strongest material. Visually, the leads' facial expressions are doing most of the work. Take those away and the animation gets noticeably stiffer, with plenty of jokes resolved through a held reaction shot or a chibi cutaway standing in for actual movement. The school setting around them is unremarkable in the way most of this genre is — not bad, not distinctive, just present. None of that actively hurts a show built this heavily on conversation, but the visuals aren't pulling any extra weight either — they're there, and that's about it. The music follows a similar shape. Opener "Q&A Recital!" comes from Haruka Tomatsu, Shizuku's own voice actress, which makes for a fun bit of behind-the-scenes overlap — though the track itself is a fairly standard-issue burst of anime-pop energy that clashes with the more subdued show it's attached to. The ending song, 9nine's "White Wishes," is a much better tonal fit. The incidental score supports scenes well enough in the moment but isn't the kind of thing you'll be humming afterward. If there's a reason to watch this, it's the two leads — everything else here is just the frame they're standing in. Put the two of them in a room and they can hold an entire episode together with nothing else happening. Nearly everything surrounding them — plotting, side characters, animation, score — lands somewhere between unremarkable and easy to forget, and the last episode won't tie anything up in a way that feels earned or complete. Come to this for two people who don't understand each other trying anyway; don't come expecting the rest of the machine around them to be running at the same level. And if you do get invested, know that episode 12 or so is roughly where the adapted material runs out — that's your cue to switch to the manga if you want to see the story through.