Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT: A

Yeah, I thought it was about that good too.

So we've had a lot of sequels lately, and some have been good and some have been not so good.  Haganai season 2 falls into the 'really excellent' category, the kind of sequel that improves its parent series through its existence.

Season 1 of Haganai introduced us to the characters as their roles in the neighbors club: Yozora was the clever, possessive but shy and maladjusted leader, Sena was her rival/sidekick who usually got the short end of the stick, Kobato and Maria were also engaged in a rather brutal hate/rivalry relationship, Rika is a lascivious genius pervert constantly trying to get Kodaka to have sex with her and being rebuffed, and Yukimura is a boy being made to dress like a girl both to make him 'more manly' and because Yozora is a bully.  Of course, Kodaka is our straight man in this crowd, the guy who actually just wants to make friends and winds up at the center of a complex romantic web which he appears to be ignorant of.

Season 2 of Haganai takes every single one of these roles and turns them on their respective ears: situations change, we learn new things about each of the characters and they learn new things about each other, we explore what makes each of them do what they do, their motivations and what the Neighbor's club in general and its members in particular mean to them, developing their relationships and injecting the stress that comes of deepening relationships.  The series manages to take its original concept and grow it into an intelligent commentary on friendship, progress in relationships and fear of commitment.

Even more amazing is that it manages to do it while remaining humorous, silly and full of fan service.

Haganai's second season makes the series as a whole, pretty much the best series with harem elements I've ever seen, mostly because it becomes a meta-commentary on the idea of having a bunch of girls in love with one guy, and also because it avoids the pitfall of story stasis.  While the second season does not wrap things up, it ends in such a way that the situation has not only irrevocably changed, but that change has been accepted by the cast as a whole, and THAT is what makes it unique.

This series really cements my general theory that the less new characters are introduced in a sequel, the better the sequel will be.  We have 3 new named characters this time around; all of them have minor roles and one of them doesn't even have dialogue until the very last episode.

If you liked Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Season 1, Season 2 is a blast.  If you want to see a winkingly naughty exploration of romance, friendship and difficulties of finding your place while remaining yourself, Haganai is both funny and moving.  Pretty much the only people who won't like Haganai are those who can't stand people being creepy, awkward, rude or cruel (though almost universally played for laughs) to people who are (though they might not admit it) their friends.

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai

Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai:  B+

I'm not sure if I'm just being really generous with series lately, or if I'm just on a long run of series that are actually quite good.

"Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai" means "I Don't Have Many Friends," and it is abbreviated "Haganai." (After the -wa, -ga and -nai endings of the nouns and verb.  You write Wa with a Ha when you're using it as a particle in Japanese.)

And really, it's a show about two girls (the two in the front) being totally unbelievable bitches to each other.

The premise is that our main character (Kodaka, the boy wrangling lolis in the above image) has naturally part-blonde hair which looks like a bit of a bad dye job.  In Japan, this is a sure sign of a delinquent, and due to a bit of bad luck, he acquires and maintains this reputation after transferring to a new school, and remains friendless for over a month.  Things change when he encounters a girl talking to her invisible friend, and they manage a conversation about how difficult it is to make friends, and how there's no easy way to do so.  The girl, Yozora (the front left in the above image), founds her own club and has Kodaka join, the Neighbors club, dedicated to making friends.

Needless to say, the kind of people who would want to join a club for making friends are the kind of people who have no friends.  And there's universally a reason they don't have friends.  Reasons vary.  Sena, (front right), is too popular, rich and attractive enough to be treated as anything but an object of jealousy by girls and of lust by guys.  Yukimura (in the maid outfit in the back, male) is a weenie little trap of a boy (maybe?), and is constantly bullied and mocked, and joins to become more manly like the presumably violent and delinquent  (he's not) Kodaka.  Add in genius pervert Rika (front center), Kodaka's little sister (the goth loli) and their 10-year-old nun teacher advisor (the nun in the back) and you have the Neighbors club, a bunch of failures at life and making friends.

In the end, it's Kodaka and a bunch of girls (and Yukimura, who, on Yozora's orders, dresses like a girl so that he can learn to express his masculinity properly... or probably just because Yozora is a bully) wind up hanging out and doing whatever it is they feel like, which mostly involves them being a petty bunch of anti-social bullies.

The series runs with a fair amount of fan service, mostly involving bathing suits rather than underwear, and usually deliberately shown.

And yet, despite being a fan servicey harem series about a bunch of characters who are terrible people to each other, I find myself really having enjoyed watching it.  I laughed, chuckling to myself and saying "oh my god, Yozora you're such a bitch," "... and now Sena is petty," or "Rika, you are the most amazing pervert ever."

There is an overarching plot beyond Yozora and Sena constantly trying to one-up the other, and the series does discuss friendship, (Yozora and Sena, despite being truly outstandingly rude and even cruel to each other, are clearly friends) but you have to read fairly closely between the lines if you want to try to gather any significant meaning or story.

But you know what?  Haganai isn't trying to be deep, it's trying to be funny.  And if you want to watch some cute girls be kind of pervy and extremely bitchy to each other, you'll get a set of great laughs out of Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai.  And if you're interested in deep and meaningful stories... well, there's a little bit there for you to.  But if you like seeing more than one guy in your anime, or actually expect anything like sanity or realism in the depiction of characters, this is a show that will disappoint.

Edit 7/13:  So, I'd like to note that I was wrong about sane depictions of characters in this series.  Once you've seen the second season and have figured out the characters' motivations, everything they ever do makes perfect sense, and once you think about their situations, even the extremeness of Yozora's bitchery and Sena's gullibility do not seem  unreasonable.