Story Pile: Skip & Loafer

Why Talen, you may say, this isn’t smooch month any more. This is plain out ordinary March! March is a time for pi day and references to ‘march forth’ and more resentment of American culture for its permeating omnipresence! What’s with this anime, which is obviously a smooch month anime, set apart from its normal and natural habitat of the month where I talk about people doing smooches? It is, after all, so very, very obviously, an anime about a pair of characters who smooch, right?

Right?

Skip And Loafer sure has the look of a high school romance anime. It is, in a way, a purer way, exactly that, with its deliberate focus on how characters feel, except the predominant feeling is one of relentless alienated anxiety. The characters of Skip & Loafer are teenagers standing on the precipice of a stage of their life; the point where high school is giving them tastes of control, of the capacity to choose their future (within reason), and the way that these characters grapple with those choices and work out now before they try and work out tomorrow.

But that’s your top level view of things, the more specific element of this story is our focus on the main character, Iwakara Mitsumi, a country bumpkin who has come to The Big City to do Proper High School as part of her progression towards University education, a decorated life in the public sector before retiring to the mayoral role at her small home town and scattering her posthumus ashes into the sea of Toyko, and Shima Sosuke, a pretty chill guy. This is not a joke, this is what they’re both like. Sosuke has grown up in Tokyo and is very familiar with city life and Mitsumi grew up in a bog, where the people are fascinated by the periodic appearance of a plane going overhead and consider worshipping it as a god. Okay that is a joke.

Mitsumi is a lovely study of someone who, without a clear way of parsing the unspoken nature of reality from the social spaces around her, has read the literature on what a high school life is like and is executing on that plan as per the documentation.

I talk about how a lot of anime characters lately have anxiety disorders but oh my god Mitsumi has an anxiety disorder.

Sosuke is a boy who just seems to have shown up alongside her, and freed from all her concerns and anxieties, is able to provide a sense of grounding and also the directions to school because he isn’t lost on a train platform. This is, as you might expect from the obvious ‘these are two very different people’ pitch, his problem, where he’s so chill and relaxed that he can temper her anxiety, yeah, it turns out that that’s because he is so chill and relaxed because he has a hard time caring about anything at all.

And that’s your pitch, that’s your lot. Two people who see in one another something wildly different to who they are, and obviously, from there, we watch them orbit one another in ever increasing circles as they move in to bump into one another with an almost Hallmark thonk.

But no.

What sets Skip & Loafer apart for me is that after this initial setup where it seems to be designing the structure of a romance anime, and you can regard every character in it as a complication or a confusion along that way, the show resolutely does not bother doing anything with that. Instead, the series spends its time showing these two people falling In Friends with one another, and in Friends with the people around them. They learn about one another, with the regular lens of Mitsumi’s unawareness of the realities of Tokyo high school life being brought to bear on things like phone communities, whisper networks, fashion and afterschool socialisation.

This series is about the gimmick of what if the hottest boy in school was your bestie and actually nice, and then the ensuing narrative is full of people making presumptions about what that means. It’s not building towards a romance because it’s building towards a much more complicated and difficult struggle that is being friends with one another.

Actual friends, mind you.

These characters learn about one another’s emotional inner lives. They learn about one another’s anxieties and histories. There is a way of being in school where nobody knows you or cares about you, where people just bounce along superficially, with the classical anime character who has no friends or one who is only in class for a hot second before the adventure breaks out, and this series eschews that shortcut to get to where it wants to go. This is an anime where the relationships people have and the assumptions other people have about what those relationships mean form the tension of the characters associating and then, at some point, they realise ‘hey, we’ve been focusing on one another over this other reason for so long, are we actually friends?’

It’s such a strange thing to me, as someone whose high school life was unsurprisingly hollow; literally nobody from my high school life has remained in my life at all. The day I graduated is the last day I saw almost all of them. We did not really come to understand one another or what it meant to spend time with one another, or our childhoods — and it makes the image of what Skip & Loafer presents intriguing and mysterious to me.

I think part of what I love about it is the realisation that the romance that seems to be the point isn’t the point is this slow creeping understanding. These aren’t characters who are going to focus on dating and smooching – neither Sosuke nor Mitsumi are in that space mentally. They’re both unpacking problems they have that make it hard for them to form relationships, though hilariously, her problem is mostly not understanding how other people are going to respond to naked honesty.

It’s not a hard anime to love for it. You’re going to watch some people have a nice time after school, you’re going to laugh at some misunderstandings, you’re going to see the threads of darker and more challenging emotional realities that they can handle if they approach them carefully, and then the series is over. They’re friends. There’s going to be a tomorrow, and that tomorrow will have one another in it.

Oh and special shoutout to Mitsumi’s aunt, who is a trans woman that gets to be cool and good in her show and isn’t the butt of any jokes that I can perceive.