Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Today we’re continuing our journey through Bloom Into You, a thoughtful romance that has been impressing me at every turn. While the show’s first three episodes essentially acted as a self-contained arc setting up the initial relationship and club situation of Yuu and Touko, our most recent episode significantly expanded the scale of our drama, directly roping in new characters like Maki while also hinting at potential conflicts for characters like Sayaka and Koyomi. Yuu and Touko’s feelings are still central, but the scope of this world is clearly expanding, and I’m looking forward to seeing more complex character dynamics develop between all our leads.

At the moment, Maki feels like the biggest question to me. While his desire to be a romantic spectator is to some extent understandable, it still feels like a strange motivation that won’t necessarily lend itself to realistic or sympathetic drama. But given Bloom Into You has handled all its prior conflicts with such thoughtfulness and grace, I have plenty of confidence that Maki will also develop into a multifaceted and at least theoretically sympathetic character. Either way, I’m excited to see whatever’s coming next as we continue our journey through this terrific show!

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Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thrilled to continue our journey through Bloom Into You, a show that’s only been impressing me more each episode. Bloom Into You has already convincingly sculpted both of its leads into flawed, multifaceted, and totally sympathetic characters, each with their own compelling sources of insecurity and reasons for relying on the other. Their relationship is based on a give and take that feels totally understandable – Touko’s support gives Yuu the confidence to accept her own nature and become a more generally expressive person, while Yuu’s trust gives Touko a place where she can admit to all her insecurities, letting down the mask she bears around everyone else. The two of them are stronger together for convincing and well-illustrated reasons, and possess a chemistry that makes them inherently fun to watch together.

Beyond that, there’s plenty else to enjoy here, from the show’s thoughtful reflections on how narratives shape our personal expectations, to its visual elegance and compassionate engagement with sexual identity. And with Touko having won her student council race, it feels like the show may just now be settling into its principle dramatic mode. Let’s see what’s in store for our hapless teens in the next episode!

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Buckle up folks, it’s time for another episode of the altogether excellent Bloom Into You. The show’s first episode offered a poignant and consistently convincing glimpse into our heroine Yuu’s worldview, and the followup extended that grace of illustration to her “friend” Touko and the greater world around them. So far, director Makoto Katou’s fondness for rich colors and saturated lighting have aligned perfectly with Bloom Into You’s dramatic intentions, creating a world that can alternately feel lonely and claustrophobic or as fancifully beautiful as a shoujo confession scene. The careful execution of sequences like Touko kissing Yuu have created a consistent and fascinating tension between the world as Yuu experiences it, and the world as she’s been led to believe it’s supposed to be. The conflict playing out in Yuu’s thoughts is thus beautifully echoed by the world around her, resulting in a show whose visual style perfectly mirrors its dramatic priorities. When you couple that compelling aesthetic holism with the show’s generally strong dialogue and compassionate approach to its core conflict, you end up with an altogether excellent high school drama. If the show can keep this up, we’re in for a very rewarding journey. Let’s embark on our next episode!

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Today we return to the so-far excellent Bloom Into You, and take another stab at surviving the teenage experience! The show’s first episode demonstrated a variety of unique strengths, from its attractive backgrounds and purposeful direction to its fairly convincing characterization and dialogue. Yuu’s insecurities and overall personality already feel reasonably well established, though she’s still mostly been characterized in terms of her feelings towards romance. Touko is a bit further away from us, but that’s expected and intentional – episode one was largely from Yuu’s perspective, and Touko is a mystery to Yuu.

The show is also demonstrating an extremely welcome sensitivity when it comes to gay relationships. I’m used to the inherently salacious “this is such a scandal” approach of shows like Citrus or Love To-Lie Angle, but here, two girls potentially being in love is treated with genuine sensitivity. Not only are Yuu and Touko’s feelings treated with respect, but the show has already naturally illustrated the inherent social pressure to conform to your assumed sexuality. Scenes like Yuu’s friends lamenting that her lack of interest in boys means they “can’t have girl talk” demonstrate how young gay people aren’t just beset by out-and-out bullies and bigots; the base assumptions of a heteronormative society can leave us isolated even from our closest friends.

Finally, I’m also very intrigued by Bloom Into You’s fractured relationship with shoujo storytelling. The show opened with Yuu outright declaring her fascination with love as depicted in adolescent fiction, and the first episode constantly presented a negotiation between interrogating shoujo storytelling and outright embracing it for its own purposes (like for Yuu’s fairy tale introduction to Touko). I’m fascinated by the uneasy relationship between not just our lives and our expectations, but also reality and the fictions we make of it, so Bloom Into You’s restless dance with fantasy is also very compelling to me. With all that said, let’s dive into another episode!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time! Today we’re embarking on another new anime journey, as we explore the first episode of the ongoing Bloom Into You. I actually reviewed this episode once before for the ANN Preview Guide, but those pieces are designed mostly just to be a “is this worth checking out” snapshot, so today I’m happy to revisit it. As I mentioned in that post, my outside knowledge of Bloom Into You is fairly limited – I know it’s a generally well-regarded yuri romance known for its slow pacing and uncommonly sensitive emotional insights, but that’s about it. That’s more than enough for me, to be honest – I’m a sucker for romance and stories that respect and celebrate all our small emotional turns, so I’m very on board for a gentle love story.

As for this anime production, my only experience with director Makoto Katou is 2015’s Beautiful Bones. That show was certainly pretty, but I often felt its use of rainbow and pastel colors essentially overwhelmed the screen, saturating our perspective in a manner that felt more overbearing than evocative. Still, most of Beautiful Bones’ issues were more reflective of its source material than its visual execution, and with a well-regarded manga and veteran composer Jukki Hanada (Love Live!, A Place Further than the Universe, maybe half of KyoAni’s recent productions) handling series composition, I’m excited to see what Katou can really do. Let’s dive right into Bloom Into You!

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