Series premieres July 2024. Visual source is the official twitter. Check out the Crunchyroll article for additional cast/staff information. Synopsis from AniList:
Kazuhiko Nukumizu is a high school boy content to blend in with the background mob, until he witnessed his more popular classmate Anna Yanami get dumped by her childhood friend. He felt like he had to try to comfort Yanami, but this led him to become entangled with other girls who have met defeat at love?
Spent part of the day checking this out.
It’s a light novel original. There’s a manga adaptation, and that’s where I started. It wasn’t very good though, and I was pretty sure, as is often the case when a lot of the text in the original is the thoughts inside the protagonist’s head, that the manga was just skipping over big chunks of it. I kept plugging away through four chapters (mostly because they were done by Skythewood, and I trust their judgement - our tastes strongly overlap), but then found that 5 and 6 are missing from mangadex, some sort of sniping war has broken out starting with chapter 7, and Skythewood has apparently dropped it.
In sorting all of that out, I discovered that Skythewood has been translating the light novel, so I just read that instead. And discovered that the manga has indeed left out huge chunks of the original.
It’s pretty good all in all. It’s very definitely of the “oddly proud and determined loner finds himself surrounded by pretty girls” subgenre that seemed to really take off with the success of Oregairu. The twist with this one, and to its credit, is that all of the girls are romantic losers who initially turn to the protagonist for a shoulder to cry on (either figuratively or literally), then it expands from there, as they come to appreciate him more broadly and he starts coming out of his self-imposed exile.
And thankfully the anime art appears to be based on the LN illustrations rather than the manga.
So - IMO, the LN is pretty good, the anime is promising, and the manga can be ignored.
Sounds interesting. Might give this a try this summer. I haven’t taken a good look at the lineup for this summer’s shows, so I am not quite sure where on the priority list this one will fall. I have also found that there are a couple translator groups that, when I see they translated something, it makes it more likely for me to check it out.
I still can take those character designs seriously
