Wasteful Days of High School Girls is a 12 episode anime that’s based upon the manga. It follows three high school students, who attend an all-girls school. the main protagonist is Tanaka Nozomu, also known as “Baka” (aka idiot). As you can tell from her nickname, she can be quite an idiot, thinking up of the most stupid of things and placing her priorities on useless ideas. She actually enrolled into an all-girls school without realise it was an all-girls school, as she just want to find a hot boyfriend to date.
The other two protagonists are Kikuchi (“Wota”) and Saginomiya (“Robo”). Kikuchi is aspiring to become a manga artist, and her nickname stems from “otaku”. She’s into yaoi as well. Despite appearing at first to be the straight and serious one, can be the most exaggerated in terms of reactions. She is exclaiming about something around half the time. Saginomiya appears emotionless, hence the nickname “Robo”. She’s quite unusual not because of her interest in microbiology, but in how she displays it. she carries random specimens around and spout random facts.
They make for an unusual, with Wota and Robo, despite their own quirkiness, seeing Baka as a true moron. For comedic effect, it gets to the point where they just ignore her at times. There are other supporting characters, each with their own defining feature, like the young short girl (“Loli”), or the delusional classmate (“Yamai”). Rounding it out is their relatively young male homeroom teacher, who on their first day states that he’s only interested in college women…
This is a slice-of-life anime and basically just looks at Baka’s thoughts for most of the time, which can be highly exaggerated and highly random. Effectively, every single character in the anime is weird in their own way and you can never predict the direction that the anime is going to go for. It will constantly surprise you and it can be hilariously funny when it does so. There’s no way that this will happen in real life, but at the same time, the things that they talk about and do is so mundane but done up in a humorous fashion. What clinches it are the fantastic performances of all the voice actresses.
While it does mostly revolve around Baka, there are still plenty of moments for the other characters to shine. For most of the season, each episode will focus on a supporting character, each bringing their own charm. The sheer randomness means that something extremely funny will come out of nowhere when you least expect it, and you can’t stop laughing. The various running gags, where some might not be great at its first attempt, will end up being welcomed due to its constant exposure, improving upon its quality each time, and becomes such a staple of the anime.
The title of the anime is apt because there are plenty of scenes where you seriously feel like the time spent is wasteful… but in a good way in terms of entertainment value. The characters’ reactions are what sells a lot of the humor, so even if the animation is nothing to write home about, it’s still clean and neat. As per usual with these types of anime, there are a lot of coincidences and contrived developments, so that everyone is connected somehow. You’ll tend to overlook these since this isn’t supposed to be a serious show, and it all helps aid the flow of the scenes.
The season ends with the timing coinciding with the end of the school year. You can probably tell and guess where it is going. Given that there wasn’t much of a direction for the plot, it can be tough to give it a proper ending, thus it can feel a bit abrupt here. At the same time, you know that the season is ending and you don’t want it to, as you want to see more of the shenanigans that the characters get up to as they have becoming endearing over the twelve episodes.
Overall, Wasteful Days of High School Girls is a pretty good slice-of-life comedy. The idea has been done before, there are a lot of misses, and there are a lot of weird things. However, on balance, it works more often than not. Baka may be a somewhat annoying and inept character, but she is the one that holds everyone together and she has her moments where she shines very bright.
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