UtaPri 6
Oh my.
Oh my gawd.
No wonder girls are so in love with this damn thing. lol
It really manages to balance well between the men being The Best Heterosexual Men ever and Haruka being enough of a doormat for the audience to self-insert, but not so much of a doormat that you can almost understand why every man wants to get into her pants.
Given how hard it is to achieve that balance - and the lack of success of any shoujo in the anime realm outside of say, Kimi ni Todoke - I guess I need to applaud how well this show manages to hit all those buttons. With a fucking reverse-harem of all things.
I also find this :7th moment interesting (sorry SDBurton, 7th is the OG here lol), in that the best friend is basically a non-entity without being a shitty side-character like you'd see in a male-lead harem. The self-insert girl gets to have the homosocial bond of a close female friend, but without that friend being of any threat to her harem because she lives in her own world and presumably has her own reverse-harem that doesn't involve the self-insert character.
All shoujo does this, of course, but the fact that this girl is such a non-character is actually amazing to me. She provides the same support as the "BFF" girls in Neighbourly Monsters and Say I Love You and whatever, but she literally is the most paper-thin character ever written. She exists to trope, and - much to my chagrin - she is actually stronger because of that.
Man, I think I'm starting to unironically love this show because of its craft. I can't fucking believe it.