Oregairu is a special property for me. I started writing episodic criticism about anime all the way back in 2013, and Oregairu was one of the very first shows I tackled that spring. Presenting a young man with a deep well of sadness and a vastly inflated sense of his own perceptiveness, I saw my own teenage self – bitter, lonely, genuinely pretty smart, and desperately wondering why other people seemed so happy, but I felt so empty.

Hachiman, like many lonely boys, chose to comfort himself through pulling at the uncomfortable seams in the relationships of others, while claiming that he himself chose the “path of the bear,” and willfully accepted isolation. But seasons have come and gone since then, and Hachiman has learned that genuine human connection, as painful as it often seems, is the only thing truly worth seeking. Mutual understanding may be impossible, but in Yui and Yukino, he has found two friends who are at least willing to seek it with him, embracing the pain and the joy of leaving yourself truly vulnerable.

Yui is no stranger to this process; she’s been accepting the pain of seeking honest connection all along, even when Hachiman and Yukino’s emotional defense mechanisms led to them stonewalling or lashing out at her. Without Yui’s strength and kindness, Hachiman and Yukino would never have reached this point – but now, her tendency to sacrifice her own needs for those of her friends is leaving her incapable of pursuing the relationship she truly wants. Yui has had a crush on Hikki ever since they first crossed paths, but knowing what that relationship might do to Yukino, she’s learned to bite her lip and suffer alone.

Finally, Yukino’s problems are the most intractable of all of them. Though she has consistently struggled with the same sense of social isolation that haunted Hachiman, and felt similarly disdainful of her peers’ superficial relationships, unlike him, she chose to rebel through excellence. Acing every test and challenge placed before her, she made herself a living example of her brutal standards – a tactic she undoubtedly learned from her family life, where actively failing was out of the question, and only proving her isolated excellence allowed her to maintain any sense of autonomy. But now, just as Yukino is reaching out for genuine connection with her friends, that family has appeared again, demanding their prodigal daughter return to the fold. As we enter season three, Yukino’s family situation looms overhead, while the end of high school lurks in the distance. Can this fragile bond survive the upending of their entire social paradigm?

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