Anime review: Orange
A typical shojo romance is predictable at best and forgettable at worst. Adding extra fuss to the romance is an easy way to make it seem different, but only when it changes the formula, instead of spicing the same old stuff. Orange is the perfect example of trying to pass as different, only to completely mess it up because it never tried to change something past the premise.
In today’s lesson of what not to do when writing a proper story, we have the tale of bland girl, who knows her future boyfriend is going to commit suicide and is given the chance to save his life. The reason she knows it, is because she received a letter from her future self, when she threw it in the Bermuda Triangle, which somehow acts as a time machine, and was then found by a postman, who delivered it to her past self… What? …
Basically, the premise makes absolutely no sense. It’s there just to make a shojo romance to stand out from the rest of the lot, and to its credit it succeeded. It was in the highest rated manga of all times while it was still published, and also one of the highest rated shows while it was airing. Obviously, it fell from grace very fast, once the audience awoke from the slumber of overly melodramatic nonsense and realized the plot is one of the same crap as any other shojo.
Instead of improving the overall, the time travel fuss only managed to point out how dumb everyone is. Knowing future events should normally make characters more self-aware, and thus smarter than the average specimen of the genre. Which is not what happens, since everyone kept acting the same way. Every single one of them remained a cookie-cutter archetype, and postponed the resolution up until the last minute. Nothing of importance happens in the meantime than can’t be summed up as a generic set up we have seen a million times.
The excuse is obviously because “we need to somehow fill an entire season with this needlessly dramatic premise” so everyone was written to act as socially inept as possible, even when they are not supposed to. Just like in any other shojo romance, they constantly hold back, are shy and are not willing to do the obvious as if something bad is going to happen if they save the guy’s life.
But as I said, it worked for a lot of plebs, who kept on watching because they really wanted to see the bland shojo heroine to save the life of the bland shojo boyfriend wannabe. It was a perpetual blue-balling, not that different from any other romance out there, fooling its audience to keep tolerating the ridiculously dense girls, in hopes of one day confessing their love, only to never happen before the very end.