You end up acquiring a few things while living alone for the first time
Way back when, Honey and Clover was all the rage and everyone was writing about it. And so, I looked it up on The Internet™. One of the things that a lot of people said (not necessarily the people that were writing about it, since I didn’t read those until after I’d finished watching) was that it painted a picture of university life that resonated with them. It turns out being a student and having no money is a common thing. Well, as a student with hella well-paying software development internships, that wasn’t really the part of Honey and Clover that spoke to me.
But there is a show that paints a picture of away-at-school life that I do identify with, and that’s Hidamari Sketch. Of course, instead of moe wideface art students in high school, most of the people I knew were engineering and math students who are gigantic nerds. Which is fine, since I am not a moe wideface art student anyway and shenanigans don’t ensue only because one is a moe wideface art student. Whether or not that’d make a good anime is another question.
What HidaSke does is it touches on all the parts of living away from home that I remember fondly. See, now that it’s over and I’m living with random strangers, I really miss this part of my happy undergrad life. In the HidaSke comparison, I’d be Yuno, going off to school for the first time and not very outgoing. Luckily, I met a bunch of cool people who helped me along the way.
The most obvious cool people are the helpful upper years I met. Just like Sae and Hiro, they’d be checking up on us, inviting us over for food, asking about classes, and commiserating with us, because being engineer is suffering. And like Sae and Hiro to Yuno and Miyako, they became really good friends once I was able to figure the whole university thing out.
The various housemates that I’ve lived with are more like Miyako, who are cool but weird. I’ve even had one housemate that contains her, uh, spontaneity, who would disappear on adventures on his bike or surprise us with a cat. Most of my other housemates were just huge nerds, ranging from lesser weeaboos and general engineering nerds all the way up to the guy that can sing the Nico Nico Douga medley.
The reason I love HidaSke so much is because the things that sketches are centered around are things that I remember doing and vice versa. I bet you could make a HidaSke sketch centered around carrying a traffic light home and trying to figure out what to do with it. Or a sketch about what to do about suddenly receiving too many hamburgers. Or a sketch about learning to juggle. Or a sketch about tossing a cat around.
And that’s just people I lived with. My actual classmates are another whole ball of fun, although that one has some suffering mixed into it too. But that’s a story for another time.
