The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Aharen-san wa Hakarenai Season 2

Reinia Aharen is quiet and has no sense of personal space, and Raido looks intimidating—and they're seat-neighbors. This unlikely pair has grown close to one another and are now going out with each other. Their second year of high school has just begun, and they're ready to take it on in their unique way.

Aharen-san wa Hakarenai Season 2 is based on a manga by Asato Mizu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Who expected this understated hidden gem of a romantic comedy from 2022 to receive a second season? Certainly not me, and given that I hugely enjoyed its first season of gentle, socially awkward humor, I couldn't be happier to see the return of the stoic Raido with his irrepressibly overactive imagination and his diminutive girlfriend, the indecipherable Reina Aharen of the title.

As with many high school-set anime comedies, Aharen-san sticks to a handful of core jokes, but continues to iterate on them in the most delightfully adorable fashion. This episode alone may have caused me at least a dozen new dental cavities from pure sweetness overload. Central to the show is Raido and Reina's cute, mutually supportive relationship. They're an odd couple who fully get one another. Mostly. Raido is prone to impressively catastrophic flights of fantasy when it comes to Reina's wellbeing, and Reina's not terribly adept at making her needs/worries/intentions understood, but somehow they muddle through happily together.

The whole cast of side characters are present and correct, with each of their quirks on show, such as bizarrely intense teacher Ms. Tobaru, who spews blood at the slightest hint of “esteem.” It's a shame she's our apparently highly-esteemed (at least in her eyes) central couple's homeroom teacher now. The poor woman will likely need a few transfusions by the end of the academic year.

The new character, Riku Tamanaha, fits right in with the other eccentric students; a blonde gyaru who is as effusively enthusiastic as Reina is reserved and quiet. Their budding friendship is both powerfully wholesome and precariously fragile, with both girls hiding unresolved emotional trauma from elementary school. Despite the mostly light-hearted tone, Aharen-san still finds time to explore the complexities of adolescent friendships, including the crippling self doubt, second-guessing, self-sabotage, and need for connection common to so many people. I cheered as Reina and Riku came to a proper understanding of what they meant to one another.

While Aharen-san barely features much of a plot to speak of, and each episode tends to mostly comprise a collection of loosely-associated skits, it still manages to sneak in some profound emotional truths in between the gently offbeat humor and cutesy hijinks. As pure saccharine comfort food, I adore its light frothiness and am very glad that these adorable dorks are back to brighten up my TV screen.

What a fun pair Aharen and Raido are. In a landscape full of rom-coms hellbent on drawing out the question of “will they, won't they” for as long as they possibly can, it's refreshing to watch one that's less concerned with that every once in a while. As ever, this show isn't so concerned about interpersonal drama between the two in the heat of a high school romance, instead, just letting the audience enjoy these two off-beat chums in all their quiet, awkward glory. Inevitably, it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it sure is mine.

Still, the fact that their second-years now seems pretty inconsequential to their routine. They're still seatmates (oh my god, they were seatmates). They're still up to their usual antics. The teacher who's always impressed by how esteemed they are is their homeroom teacher. And in fact, all their friends are now in the same class as them—including Mitsuki. No, if anything can be said to be a potential disruptor to their routine, it's the new gyaru student named Riku, who's very interested in Aharen.

A new character to add to their squad seems like a good way to mix things up a bit. Don't get me wrong: I think the comedy in this show is good enough that it didn't necessarily need a new character. I would've been perfectly satisfied continuing to watch Raido's imagination get away from him any time Aharen so much as blinks in a weird direction. Still, Riku seems like a pretty fun character, and even in this episode, we've already seen her be charming and funny.

In particular, toward the end, there's a bit about Riku forgetting Mitsuki's name and doing all that she can to remember—which, well, is painfully relatable and gave me a hearty laugh. My partner is the same way too, and when we were in college, he called one of his classmates who he often met on the train home “my dude” for eons because he could never remember or otherwise figure out his name (to this day, he still has no idea what it is). Needless to say, that was all I could think about, and it made the whole thing even funnier.

This is all to say that I think this is a really funny show, and I'm looking forward to watching more. I was taken aback by just how much I ended up liking season 1—the fidget spinner episode especially was so legendary—so I got high hopes for season 2. And if this first episode is any indicator, then things seem to be off to a good start.