Why SNAFU’s Deconstructive Elements Make it Such a Thought Provoking Show

by Jack Scheibelein

       Despite popular belief, not all Anime is pandering nonsense watched by guys in their twenties and thirties who live in their mom’s basement. No show exemplifies how expectations can flipped on their head better than My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU. The 2013 spring released Anime flew very under the radar and probably didn’t receive the amount of praise that it should have, given its insightful social commentary on the life of teenagers and the things people take for granted, even when coming from a Japanese perspective. Aside from its general likeability the show as much to offer as a Deconstruction of what is known as the slice of life genre.

       Slice of life is more specifically a genre in the medium of Anime in which a few characters simply live out their lives in whatever universe they happen to be in. There is no overarching theme most of the time, the genre is kind of a misnomer. The genre tends to be filled with shows that have a happy ending without really any struggle. It also is more commonly set in the soul sucking vacuum from which no happiness can escape that most people call high school. A few good examples would be shows like K-ON, Lucky Star, Chihayafuru, Kimi no Todoke, and a slew of other shows.

       Just for a bit of background on the plot, the show is about loner high school student named Hachiman Hikigaya. Seeing that he has absolutely no social life whatsoever, his teacher, Shizuka Hiratsuka, forces him to join the school Service Club, whose main goal is to help students at the school with problems that come up in their lives. This creates a story in which Hachiman is forced into solving everyone’s various problems, be it through physical work or through a conflict of ideas. Already in the club is fellow classmate Yukino Yukinoshita who seems to have a similar but slightly less pessimistic outlook on life. The story becomes less about his adventures in a high school club, which is what most Slice of Life stories turn into, and more about the ideological conflict between pessimist to the extreme, someone who is somewhere in the middle, and an optimist in the form of the service club’s third member Yui Yuigahama.

       This is where SNAFU shines the most. It uses what you would typically see from the from the Anime in the Slice of Life genre and creates a show centered around high school philosophy, and also constructs a story and characters that complete subvert your expectations, which is the entire concept of a Deconstruction. Although, this does only refer to the first season(The second season is an entirely different beast to take on).

       The first thing to note about this show is that almost nobody is happy.

Just like actual high schoolers, and unlike the high schoolers of the usual Slice of Life Anime, everybody in the story has their own problems and battles to fight. It’s not all sunshine, unicorns, and rainbows. This is most exemplified in the main character Hachiman. Because he was hit by a car while trying to rescue a dog in the street he is hospitalized for two months and does not start school until more than halfway through the semester. This is the main reason, as he likes to believe, that he does not have friends, but it is a lot more than that. Hachiman’s pessimistic attitude stems mostly from the fact that he got rejected by all the girls he asked out on a date in middle school. His attitude and general lack of confidence or empathy for makes him an outsider to everyone around him, except for Yukino.

       Yukino and Hachiman end up being at odds for most of the show despite being a lot more similar than either one likes to admit. It is because of this similarity and also her somewhat outcast status that she can relate to his pleas.

       Because the show centers mostly around the actions of the Service Club, it is through the way in which they help people with their problems that we see the members individual ideologies and how they perceive the world around them, and in credit to the two main characters more largely negative perceptions that we see a more realistic view of high school and a rather large shift from the happy go lucky attitude of most Slice of Life Anime.

       Another reason that differs in its storytelling is that high school is not the main focus is not on high school specifically. In Fact the dynamic might not be any different even if it was a story focused around a local charity. High School is really only used as an entry point into the minds of the teenagers and how they interact with each other.

       The purpose of the Anime is not to paint a picture of an absent-minded high school existence where the only thing they worry about is social status and grades good enough to get into college. Rather, as what constitutes a Deconstruction, SNAFU uses the high school setting as a battle ground for different outlooks on life.

       This is shown best in episode five, where Hachiman is confronted with his friend from middle school who needs his help in looking at his novel that he is attempting to write. In this case Hachiman’s friend still has a very child-like outlook on life, mostly because he has not grown out of his middle school mindset. In this cased high school is used as a barrier to separate Hachiman from his friend in their views of the future, with high school representing a descent into reality.

       The last thing that makes SNAFU stand out from the crowd is, of course, the philosophy. The shows overall message seems to be that there really is no one way to live life and that, in the end, is not ruled by a single narrative.

       Hachiman believes that nobody likes him and that his social outcast status has relegated him to bearing everyone’s burden. In his eyes, it is only logical that he should be treated as everyone’s slave, further enforcing the idea that he should stay in the club. Yukino, as mentioned previously, has a similar idea. In her case it is because of her popularity among a large population of their school and her wealthy status that she has been cast out as one of the “other.” This causes her to believe that she does not care about the opinions, while it is fairly obvious that Hachiman cares at least a little. Yui, who as a main character is largely ignored after the first couple of episodes, has a dependence on others for acceptance. At first she believes that she can only be validated through other people. Her ideas later change after talking to both Yukino and Hachiman for a long time. She goes from reliant to independent by the end of the first season.

       Life is a series of trials and errors where the errors seem to have more weight than any long string of successes. My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU presents an oddly more real “Slice of Life” than any other show in the genre, making it an amazing Deconstruction and even better Anime.

Here's a different take on SNAFU from Animenewsnetwork.