Horimiya doesn’t do anything remarkable or groundbreaking It’s just really pleasant to watch. Overtime, we see the once lonely Miyamura develop a loving and supportive community around him. This pace allows the debut season of the show to quickly move away from showing just Hori and Miyamura’s relationship, and gives us space to learn about all the other people in their life. In Horimiya, we see them fall for each other in a matter of episodes. (We learn he has tattoos and piercings!) In other shojo, it’s not uncommon for a story to take entire seasons for the love interests to hold hands, and might not even show a kiss. The show follows Hori, a responsible big sister and confident student with friends, and her budding romance with Miyamura, a shy and quiet loner with a secret edgy look outside of highschool. Horimiya, a show whose namesake comes from combining the names of its two central love interests, Kyouko Hori and Izumi Miyamura, is about as darling as you’d expect a show named after its two lovers to be. Chris Planteīeastars season 1 and 2 are available to stream on Netflix. And like the works of Shakespeare, Beastars can be contorted into whatever else you want it to be. A sexy, violent, and often frustrating tale of star-crossed lovers kept apart by society. In that way, Beastars is like Romeo and Juliet. I enjoy the show best when I take its internal logic on its own terms. I know this is gauche amongst critics, but for me, Beastars works when I quit trying to make a one-to-one connection between our world and its city of horny teenage carnivores and herbivores. Frankly, I’ve stopped caring about what it’s about. Or perhaps it’s a coming of age story about a generation of young people disconnected from their parents by rapidly changing norms.

Maybe it’s holding a magnifying glass to sexual violence on campus. Though it could be a cringey, misguided exploration of race. Beastars tells the story of a wolf who wants to have sex with a rabbit, but worries he will devour said rabbit.

Best anime of 2017 award