Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ Honey And Clover ( Chapter 9 )

Honey and Clover is an amazing influential anime, which spawned a NUMBER of copies. Did you like March Comes In Like A Lion? How about Your Lie In April? And Pet Girl of Sakurasou? Those are all inspired by Honey and Clover, copying large or very specific parts from the original. H&C is an amazing show because it does a fine job of defining what it means to be creative, both having more than you can do, and finding out that hard work and talent mean little to potential employers. It is brutal out there. The art is a style specific to the time, similar to Ouran High School Host Club, very pointy and stretched without much shading because that technology came several years later. H&C is about dorm life, college poverty, communal living, and love. There are several kinds of love. Pure, devoted, twisted, despairing, and even tragic. There are several characters working through pretty serious arcs of their lives in college, and some have happy endings. Others do not. The second season takes the characters you've come to care about in the first and puts them through the ringer. The music for H&C is also noteworthy, being similar in quality to Yoko Kanno, but mostly being other artists, including Suneohair, who ended up with a chart topping album from this (in Japan). Their song Sora mo Isogashii still brings tears to my eyes. 

The art will probably put many potential fans of this series off, but the story and impact are still sending ripples in anime today, 20 years later. For purely influence level, it is up there with Gundam and Evangelion and Slayers.