Gender

I feel the urge to defend this because if this show is going to be criticized, I’d rather it be based on more valid points.

I disagree that gender was a strong bias in the show. To debunk on example, it was said that Yamada was persistent, but that only led to failure and she needed a strong man to help her in the end, whereas other people’s persistence (Takemoto etc.) led to success. Actually, Yamada’s persistence was towards **Mayama** which is a bad direction to persist in. Takemoto was also persistent towards Hagu. And he got seriously depressed.

Later, Takemoto was persisting in a direction of going on a self-discovery journey, and Yamada met a new person and tried to persist towards Nomiya’s direction. That’s totally fine. There is no gender bias, and it doesn’t matter anyway since the anime is not trying to make a larger statement but rather describe several self-contained stories of individuals. If you’d like to assert that the anime is sexist, racist, etc., you do you. I personally think it detracts from the main purpose, and that viewing life from a lens can be a rather subtractive view, and that at the very least one should restrain from projecting personal politics onto a show more about individuals and relationships.

As for Mayama, he is not being some testorone-laden male by thinking that he wants to provide for Rika. Any lover would think this. In any case, he is usually quite submissive around her, until she tried to literally kill herself.