The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary Season 2

It's winter of a new school year, and Osanai and Kobato are no longer friends. Instead, she's been hanging out with a younger student, Urino, who tells her that he wants to do something to make his mark on their high school, to prove that he was there. Osanai suggests that he could do something with the newspaper club, and soon thereafter he becomes aware of a series of fires around town. Is Osanai involved? How far will Urino go to stand out?

SHOSHIMIN: How to become Ordinary Season 2 is based on a novel series by Honobu Yonezawa. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

Time moves on, and so does Kobato. Picking up during a new school year, Shoshimin opens with our protagonist from the first season no where to be seen for at least the first half of the episode, a reminder that when we last saw him, he was forced to face facts that Osanai wasn't who he thought she was…and that he, perhaps, had been ordinary the whole time. And now Osanai has a new boy she's interacting with, and I have no doubts that her motivations are just as dubious as they were the first time.

While there is something to be said for an antagonist who is as understated as Osanai, I also think it probably makes for better reading than watching. The anime adaptation does its level best to paint a picture of a world that's only distorted when you tilt your head the right way, but the glacial pacing is just as dull here as it was in the first season. We know long before new patsy Urino does that the fires his friend Hiya is mentioning to him are escalating, making the discovery that they always happen on the second Friday of a month feel like a bit of a nonevent. When Kobato comes back onto the scene to realize that the van involved in the most recent fire may have been the same van from Osanai's machinations last season, it feels like too little, too late. Even if Osanai isn't the arsonist, the slog to get to that reveal isn't quite worth it.

The series still looks beautiful; I'll give it that. Seeing Kobato attempt to embrace a very basic idea of “ordinary” while failing to understand that what makes him ordinary is his assumption that he's not is a good nod to what got him involved with Osanai in the first place, as is Urino's stated desire to make his mark. Osanai has a type she goes after, and both boys fit it, albeit in mildly different ways. The fact that she's the furthest thing from “ordinary” remains the hook the series hangs on, and while I can understand and applaud that intellectually, I also found myself checking the time remaining on the episode roughly every three minutes. I just don't like this show.

That said, this may have a bit more intrigue than the first season. Osanai is escalating, and Urino, paired with Kobato, could make the investigations more interesting. I may find that I don't care, but if you enjoyed season one, I think you're going to find plenty to like about season two as well.