Bocchi the Rock!
It's extremely funny to me that a few shows in the girls-only slice of life vein have, at least in some small circles, brought anime discourse back to 2008 ("why are people talking about these shows and not [Jump adaptation]!?") but I'm not here to be a jerk about it. Not that much of a jerk, anyway.
I just feel like I'm in my element, is all. My crops are watered. So, first: Bocchi the Rock. Or BOCCHI THE ROCK!?
Premise: Hitori Gotou aka Bocchi tries to make friends by learning to play guitar. You could argue that part of what's happening here is we're being invited to gawk at an anxious kid, but, I dunno. Two points about this:
- Granting that more than one thing can be true, I feel like the indulgence or wish fulfillment angle is more related to how we'd all like to believe the creative hobbies we engage in when no one's looking will do something for us or improve our situation in some way--it's hard to make things without hoping they could amount to something, even (especially?) if what we want is less monetary and more convincing interesting people to like us
- Bocchi is given a much greater range of internal monologue and visual-metaphoric brainspace than the shy/anxious type often is. Rather than baldly asking us to enjoy some surface-level signifiers of social anxiety in either a mean-spirited or leering way, the show at least grants that she's already funny and likeable, and what we're seeing is the struggle to make that obvious to people around her, concurrently with and complementary to her figuring out how to fit her already pretty good solo guitaring into a band
My own history of struggling to get along with people manifests as bet-hedging and conflict avoidance. For example, I have a bad habit of talking about things I like by opening with "it might seem like it sucks, but wait!" I didn't even plan it! It just worked out this way.
Anyway, I think it's nice. Re: episode 4, people focused on the line about how it's worthwhile to make art that resonates deeply with a small audience, and I agree with that. But I also see a thesis statement for the whole show in there, in how the band is okay with combining lyrics coming from a dark personal place (to a pretty mild degree in practice, but that's the conceit) with presentational cheer. Not to say I'm not suspicious of media in which, for example, global entertainment companies use cute characters to pretend to sympathize with us about how work sucks, but yeah, throw different forms and imagery together. Do popular media but do it wrong. The variegated contents of your head all belong to you.
I mean, it's not weird that Kessoku Band would've arrived at this position considering the kind of music they play. But it's also the show saying, maybe you can do an adaptation like this and also pull some mixed-media animation maneuvers you'd more expect to see if the premise were more idiosyncratic. Why not?
The sixth episode is one of those quietly monumental 1/3-hours of anime I could bury under too many words, and would, if it were in fact 2008. Bocchi confronts one possible future, nah jk, no but really though. There's a pixel art, or like, low-res 3D demoscene-adjacent sequence. There's also a thread running through this and later episodes of Bocchi figuring out that most people by default don't care about her one way or another, which is liberating in the sense that it means people aren't rooting for her to fail. It's a more satisfying alternative to some hypothetical handwaving conclusion about how she's fine because she has friends now. In fact her friends can't do much for her beyond being available; they aren't her therapists, they're teenagers, besides which loneliness is not so trivial and literal a condition that it can be resolved by simply not being alone. In addition to friends (and possibly mental health intervention), Bocchi needs a less isolating way of conceptualizing the world she lives in.
This is pretty much where we get off the Bocchi train, rolling steadily toward an understanding that people don't resent sharing space with her but with some distance yet to go. The final episode gives her a moment of triumph, immediately reminds us that this doesn't mean her problems are over, and then reinforces this point throughout. These things don't really end, you just manage them as best you can and keep on living, and I appreciate a conclusion that gestures toward that.