Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ Oregairu/SNAFU ( Chapter 1 )

Oregairu, aka SNAFU aka My Teen Romantic Comedy Is Wrong As I Expected is a favorite show, based on a series of light novels. It does a good job taking the usual school romance tropes and turning them on their heads by having the first Pessimistic anti-hero as the main character. He even sits in the wrong chair. Heroes always sit in the back of the classroom, closest to the windows so they can stare outside longingly and wait for a much-desired chance to isekai and fight the devil king. Hikkigaya Hachiman is not that guy. He sits on the inside wall, halfway down the row, and tries hard to be invisible. Unlike most shounen protagonists, he is not cheerful and upbeat. He's the opposite: depressed, realistic, and disillusioned. This character is UNIQUE in Japan and thus hugely popular for saying the things nobody is allowed to say in popular media. That their tropes are all lies, that people are fake. That girls are selfish and narcissistic. That the economy hurts families and damages kids. That stories can be written without obsessing over bullying and violence. Hachiman is not a traditional hero. He is a realist, and uses reason and logic, not a sword or shouted attacks to conquer his enemy. He doesn't get a Happy Ending. It says so in the title: Wrong As I Expected.

That is not to say there aren't chuuni characters in the story, or that there aren't tropes. There are many, but most are turned on their heads for a laugh, made into plot points. The antagonist of the story is actually his homeroom teacher, an isekai shounen protagonist if ever their was one, who ends up punching our hero in the first couple minutes of the anime after reading out his essay on Youth because it offends her. She then forces the hero to participate in the Service Club, doing good deeds for strangers (mostly) and he perverts this intent into solving problems his own way, which tends to infuriate onlookers because they can see the sense of his position and are ashamed not to realize this themselves. They hate that he is smarter. And his life isn't on easy mode. He has no power-ups, no magic, no tricks to make his life a walk in the park. This isn't an isekai, or if it is, he's not the one in another world. That's probably Shizuka, actually. 

Oregairu is a popular fanfiction series because many fans were unsatisfied with the ending. After all, the ending is in the title, and it is "wrong, as I expected". You can't be clearer than that. It is a tragedy. He shouldn't get either girl, and it will all end in tears. Of course, the series sold really well so the publisher rejected the original ending, and two more attempts, and forced the author to re-write it for the very uncharacteristically Happy Ending which doens't fit the series at all. The author has said that if fans bug the publisher enough he'd write a continuation series of Hachiman in College. I have taken it one better and did a couple of those, published here. Mine isn't his, so not canon, but i've written the characters as closely to how they are depicted as I could manage. 

The biggest problem with SNAFU is the true nature of Hachiman is corrupted by friendship, that his loneliness and determination is destroyed by market forces. What market forces? Well, publishing, of course. People who read slice of life high school romantic dramas need a loner character who makes friends and gets to pick his future wife from a bevy of beauties he wins over through his slightly heroic actions during the story. They are fictional women, and their interest in him is likewise something that sells light novels in convenience stores. If this story had been more true to the characters the girls would have lost interest rapidly, as real women do, and he'd end up more damaged by knowing them than if he'd been left to his loner self. In the real world, going through all these events would scar him and make him deeply hurt, not cutely vulnerable to romance. He'd become even more of a loner than before, because that's how the real world actually works. But SNAFU is fiction. It says so in the title. And the ending is wrong, as we expected.