Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian

Episodes 1-3

I think sometimes that we've run the gambit of interesting hooks with the sheer amount of school-life romance shows out there. Luckily, there's more to this particular show than I had initially thought—i.e., a simple slice-of-life show with the gimmick revolving around a character not being fully forthcoming about how much he understands his classmate teasing him in a different language. That's a cute idea for an episode but I don't see how you can make an entire show about that. Thankfully, there's a lot more going on here with subtle bits of foreshadowing and not-so-subtle bits of backstory—but that doesn't mean it's all sunshine and rainbows.

My biggest problem with Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian is that I don't really know what it's about yet. There are a lot of characters and character dynamics but they either don't overlap seamlessly or they overlap due to massive contrivances. During episode three, we get most of our main cast's backstory. It shocked me because some reveals were things I would typically expect to happen at the end of a show. I liked some things such as the reveal about Kuze and his sister's relationship and—weird incest leaning aside (Jesus Christ)—how the show planted seeds for that reveal to set up a darker backstory around the two being children of divorce. Will that backstory tie into the school's prestigious nature that the characters go to? There could be a subtle commentary about how one presents themselves versus how they really are in this show. It would be great if the show leaned into that while extrapolating on its initial gimmicky premise.

Other things don't sit super well with me, like Alya's backstory which could've been stretched out to an entire episode instead of just ten minutes—and the show didn't seem to do a good job either with establishing her loner mentality. The resolution wasn't handled as strongly as it should have been. I can see the story beats for what they are but I wasn't allowed to immerse myself in them for very long. The pacing of these three episodes felt remarkably uneven for a slice-of-life show—seemingly speeding through the cliff notes to get to the juicy stuff later.

Thankfully, this show doesn't look to be revealing its entire hand yet. I'm still curious to understand the nature of the divorce between Kuze's parents. If I had to guess, that probably is going to tie into his backstory with Maria who ended up being the reason why he learned Russian in the first place. I'm a little shocked that the two have not met each other at all yet before episode three; I wonder how long it will take for Kuze to realize who Maria really is. Given the pacing of episode three, I expected that reveal to be more obvious by the end but there might be more to that backstory down the road. We have a lot of moving parts and toys to play with in this show. Now the question is: what exactly will we do with them? It's definitely not a perfect premiere but Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian has my attention.

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Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.