Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive?

Episodes 1-3

How would you rate episode 2 of
Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? ?

Community score: 3.7

How would you rate episode 3 of
Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? ?

Community score: 3.7

The classic trope of best friends turning into lovers is a tale as old as time. It is probably the most overused trope in the entire romance genre, but in a lot of ways that makes sense. Whether you have one partner or multiple, there needs to be a strong friendship at some point, but oftentimes there is a fine line between a close friendship and a romantic love interest. A lot of times in romances, the story is about how that line is crossed and it's not always the cleanest transition. Despite this, this is probably one of the first shows I've watched that put so much emphasis on friendship before romance and uses it as the main force of the narrative.

Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? is an interesting show because sometimes the writing fluctuates between really good and really juvenile. You could argue the latter stems from the fact that these are teenagers who don't fully know what they want. That is pretty much the entire story revolving around our female lead Himari. She has a strong attachment to Yu and wanted to monopolize him for herself. But she was afraid to take that step into romance and decided to take the best friend route. She felt complacent and took for granted the fact that he might never fall in love with anybody else again. I can read her going out and dating other guys in the two years they've known each other as her trying to put on the appearance of the sassy best friend who doesn't have any romantically interested in Yu. She went through all of this effort to preserve this dynamic in hopes that they would still eventually get married down the road. Basically, she was trying to have her cake and eat it too.

She didn't count on a romantic rival for that affection to appear. It's very convenient that Rion ends up being literally the one girl in Yu's life that he had some type of romantic affection for, but as far as the cast goes, she is definitely the weakest in terms of characterization. I'm hoping that she gets more fleshed out as the show goes on, because at this stage, she is more or less used as a means of getting the ball rolling with Himari, who can't decide if she wants the romance to progress or if she wants to sabotage it.

This is very understandable, but we're walking a very delicate line here with Himari as a character. I can see people absolutely loving her or absolutely hating her given her actions throughout these first three episodes. She is spunky and energetic and is trying to have support Yu, but she also can't stop letting her feelings get in the way. She keeps dancing this line with him and teases him for more physical intimacy, only to turn into a joke later because she can't fully commit to it. Not only does this have the inverse effect of making Yu very uncomfortable, which is something I'm glad he admits at the end of episode three, but the irony is that if she did commit to crossing that line, he would probably reciprocate it. There's a strong implication that the line between friendship and romance between these two isn't really that thick. Himari is literally a victim of her own actions.

So almost everything she does comes from an understandable place. But "understandable" doesn't necessarily mean that people can get behind her actions. She is being very selfish, she is being very impulsive, and her wishy-washy approach can make her very frustrating to watch for both the characters in the show and for the audience. I'm a little bit in the middle at this point, but I'm worried she might fully end up crossing a different line moving forward. The end of episode three has her creating a situation that she cannot avoid in the next episode, so I'm very curious about what direction the show is going to take.

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