Bocchi The Rock! is really hitting sweet spots for me on how it presents its main character’s core plot concept. Bocchi is essentially K-On! but if main girl Yui was too introverted to function instead of too stupid to function; which is a challenge to make interesting. The Yui of this show, Hitori, is a social train wreck who convinced herself learning guitar would substitute for having a personality and make her friends, with the expected 0% success rate. The plot follows her new desperate attempt to achieve friend-dom by joining a band. Which is a character concept that gives us some extremely relatable content:
Yet the show does still have the challenge of making a character who sucks at socializing be the main character of a Slice of Life show about socializing. Its a comedy, obviously, but still that can get repetitive fast, these character types are often side characters for a reason. Shows like WataMote keep it fresh by making main girl Tomoko a degenerate scumbag on top of a shut-in, its the *degeneracy* that powers the show; you want to have an angle on characters like these
Bocchi’s angle is both character & directorial. On the character side, what endears me to Hitori is how much she is halfway there on understanding social interaction. She might be a breathing pink stress ball but she isn’t clueless, she knows, kindof, what you need to do to make friends - her panic-attack levels of social anxiety just preclude it. So you get opening scenes like these, where she dresses full-musician to go to school to inspire musician-types to talk to her:
And it falls flat on her face because she has been there for months already and still refuses to initiate anything:
But that is what fashion is for! She did look good, in another context this would work (and does accidentally to trigger the ~plot later)
Or when learning about her new also-weirdo band mate Ryo, she goes from “yes friend!!”:
To, 5 seconds later on hearing that she spends her time visiting ruined buildings & second-hand clothing stores, “oh no, not like me at all”:
Which is actually pretty smart for 5 seconds of thought, Hitori groks that interests correlate with personality and people relate to being alone differently.
The point is that Hitori’s social failure is stacked on top of social insight, the humor derives from what she gets right vs wrong. Her *almost* getting it is more enjoyable, and more importantly way more likeable, than her just flailing. She holds the stupid ball for sure but you get why, she is trying to throw it away at least, which is endearing instead of frustrating.
More exceptional is how the show communicates her struggle; she can’t talk good right? So tons of her dialogue is internal dialogue - which you have to spice up somehow, static shots w/ voice narration is not very fun. Bocchi has a grand time playing one of anime’s trump cards of having fantastical brain-scape setpieces to communicate mood. That ‘she is a loner’ revelation ain’t settling for some sparkling pink-background; we have a full apocalypse to carry her aborted dream instead:
Communicating information hits the same struggle as emotion; this is a show about music after all, and another of anime’s strengths its presumption the audience actually is interested in the details of the niche hobby stuff the show is about. But Hitori-in-actuality couldn’t teach someone how to breathe let alone music tips, so instead we get random artistic cutaways to diagrams and explainers by imaginary instruments:
Which I love! Its expressive, you can shift the artstyle in a way that doesn’t clash, it lets the animators flex technique, and the information gets across without dragging down pacing (a lot of media, *unable* to do this, simply cuts the information out entirely, primarily to spite me).
And of course since all of this is happening inside Hitori’s head, she is, apparently, immensely creative - I love her now, teach me your ways my gumball princess! Her head would be a great place to be if you could lobotomize the anxiety somehow. All this means that Hitori, while awkward, is rarely cringe - partly because the directing always cuts away from any shots that would focus on cringe, but mainly because Hitori is too interesting to be cringe, you got other things to think about.
All in all Bocchi the Rock is my favourite silly-Slice-of-Life show of the season, and I hope it continues this level of playfulness going forward.
