Yozora Mikazuki's miserable life.
I read all of Haganai's manga and I want to yell about it to micromanage my depression.
I recently ended up at the Mental Health Clinic again to placate my severe suicidal ideations. I go intermittently because when I get nihilistically depressed, I'm generally at a crossroads of what to do so I go to the clinic to get a bit of a sobering reality check to get my head screwed back on straight. This year it's been a bit more severe than usual, but I've found some coping mechanisms to help me work through it a bit better. I tend to smoke more because it's a way of committing suicide in a way that I have more agency in even if the time it takes to work is dramatically slower and less effective than a noose or a gun. On top of just smoking, most of my coping mechanisms involve spending money I don't have on things I don't need, or by delving into books and manga and writing to leave reality behind for a bit.
The problem with my manga interests is that they're dated as fuck, and I like physical books. This is a problem because all the manga I want to buy costs an arm and a leg because of scarcity or being discontinued, and there's something less interesting about reading scanned or digital comics online. But with Haganai, I owned the first five volumes of manga and afterwards pushed through the digital front for the remaining 15 volumes because fishing on eBay for them would set me back literal hundreds of dollars and if I didn't kill myself, my roommate likely would for pissing away 250 dollars on 10 books. So to the digital front I went (it also didn't help that the auction I was following sold through before I got a chance to buy it).
Haganai is a manga about losers who want to make friends. It's a band of social misfits who decide to form a club called the Neighbor's Club in an attempt to learn what it's like to be normal social humans and gain friends. It's started when Kodaka Hasegawa moves to a new school but thanks to his dirty-blonde hair and genetic scowl is seen as a hooligan when he's just a socially-awkward teenager who wants to make friends. So he meets Yozora Mikazuki talking to an imaginary friend to compensate for her lack of real ones, and then comes up with the idea of the Neighbor's Club to drag him into and to recruit more misfits to make friends with. Soon enough, more weirdos like Sena Kashiwazaki among others show up and the Hell begins.
One of the reasons I liked this premise is because of my internet social life that started off growing up in my teens. Me and a handful of angry weirdos started an internet forum to scowl at the branded idiots we liked to mock who were having fun on the official Nintendo forums. Soon enough an assortment of abrasive assholes banded together toward the common goal of fucking shit up and disrupting the norm. The forum itself eventually died when its charisma vacuum of mockery drove everyone apart, but we made some weird friends along the way. At least that's the part of it I remember, I tend to block those days out because I was heavy on the doomer incel bus around that time and I cringe at how much of an edgy teenager I was because of my general resentment towards the world.
Most of the characters in Haganai have an astounding chemistry of mockery towards each other that I painfully relate to as a black-pilled cynical teenager, but most of the torture is played for laughs and hijinks. It's a charming group to watch interact with all their various quirks, whether it's Yozora with her dour personality and nothing going for her except her looks, Sena's perfection punctuated by her superiority complex and general lack of common sense, Kodaka's dead-pan condescension towards his fellow club members, or Rika's eccentric pervertedness that vastly undermines her wasted intellect. It's funny watching these idiots pull each other apart by the seams, even if some of the humor (RAPE JOKES) hasn't aged particularly well, although it does its job of punctuating Yozora's horrendous personality.
I recommend reading it, I earnestly do. I don't care for the anime that lacks the kinetic energy and humor of the manga and leans far more heavily into trashy fanservice, and nobody has the time or energy to read light novels so I can't recommend those either, especially since I feel the manga deviations serve the general mood of the plot better than the mess of the light novels do. I recommend reading it because I'm also going to go heavily into spoilers for the series and I think the trip is worth it. Itachi's art is gold and brings out some fantastic expressions that make for good reaction and shitpost fodder while being serviceable in the series’ more tender moments.
While the general vibe of the manga is a series of shenanigans by socially-inept people, the crux of the plot is driven by Kodaka. Kodaka is generally seen as the most “normal” of the Neighbor's Club, an earnest and well-natured dude who has had to deal with misunderstandings his entire life due to his intimidating looks. In a lot of ways he's just a good dude stuck corralling a band of lunatics. His character flaws start showing up halfway through the series as somebody overly considerate; a man who doesn't want to rock the boat. Despite his best attempts at playing ignorant as the bumbling harem protagonist unaware of the growing feelings of all the women around him, he's a subversion of this trope because he's entirely lucid of all of it. But he's grown so attached to the Neighbor's Club that he believes choosing one girl over the others will create a fissure in it, which ironically his indecision and consideration of their feelings causes it anyway. I found this compelling because frankly it's relatable; a lack of honesty and over-consideration of somebody's feelings often causes more damage than it's trying to prevent and I hate that I relate to that so much.
The only person entirely aware of his facade of obliviousness is Rika, and boy howdy does she let him know. The perverted fujoshi actually manages to flex her intelligence by baiting him into compromising situations and calling him on his bullshit, which eventually leads to her declaration of being his first friend and becomes a comrade-in-arms in mending the damage he's done to the Neighbor's Club. I'll be frank, she's the best character in this series. Her pervertness is often played for laughs in all the most hilariously depraved ways, and her eventual friendship with Kodaka ends up being the most grounded and admirable character switch-ups in the series. And most importantly, it works—it manages to shake Kodaka loose enough that he ends up doing what's best for his fellow club members even if it's at the expense of some hurt feelings and inevitable damage it has to cause.
Yozora in particular is a character I want to focus on because I gravitate towards broken people due to being a pit of despair. I think she's the heart and soul of the manga, being a prime example of what the series wants to illustrate, and that's a socially-awkward loser with a miserable life who just... loses at everything she wants to do. She—much like Kodaka—is incapable of being direct when it matters, and boy howdy does it bite her in the ass the hardest throughout the series. Her entire character arc is driven by her inability to be honest, and it's almost heartbreaking to see her fail at virtually everything she sets out to do in the series. She comes from arguably the most broken household out of everyone, from divorced parents to an abusive mother who even threatened to stab her out of anger towards a kind gesture misunderstood. She gains a valuable friend that eventually betrays and bullies her over a stupid love triangle. She's terrified of opening up to people and in a lot of ways it's justified, but it ends up screwing her over constantly.
She's a childhood friend of Kodaka who's afraid to tell him she's a girl before he leaves for 10 years, and it keeps him from recognizing her when they're older when he returns to their hometown. Her inability to be forward reconnecting to him leads to her starting the Neighbor's Club in the first place, hoping that they're the only two people in it so she can reveal herself, and then other people show up and ruin it. She constantly leaves him hanging on requests to talk and the only way she ends up revealing her identity to him after ten years is her hair getting set on fire and eventually cut into a haircut that Kodaka recognizes. All the other girls competing for Kodaka's affection makes her withdraw even more, losing further ground. Her inability to express desires to be his friend again inevitably leads to Rika beating her to the punch by becoming his first friend. Her inability to express her love for him leads to Sena beating her to the punch by declaring it first, solidifying Kodaka's feelings for her instead. Her actions even lead to Kodaka actively resenting her for a brief period, and when she declares her love for him she's immediately rebuffed and Kodaka bluntly states he has no romantic feelings for her whatsoever. All of her interactions become almost agonizing and brutal to watch when it's not tied to funny shenanigans because she gets so many chances throughout the series but completely blows it. Even all her domineering and humiliating behavior to Sena loses its teeth when Sena acts as if her childhood friendship with Kodaka means nothing now.
For me at least, it's painful that I can relate to it. I came from a troubled household and almost let my inability to open up to people destroy some of my closest relationships with friends. I've hurt people, both intentionally and not. I’ve let nostalgia and the loss of a fleeting past keep me from moving forward. Sena is a person who doesn't care about the past, wants what she wants, and moves forward with her life. Yozora on a level I understand is stuck in the past, wishing for the nostalgia of long-forgotten friendships, incapable of accepting that both her and Kodaka have moved forward with their lives and may not relate anymore like they did as children. She never wins. She's stuck constantly trying to catch up to others and it takes the entire back-half of the series for her to dislodge herself from her baggage. She even feels closure declaring her love for Kodaka and being promptly shut down, but is satisfied being his friend and comrade-in-arms.
She reconnects with her sister from her father's half of the family thanks to Kodaka and Rika's intervention. She starts helping out with the student council and planning for the year-end Christmas party. She becomes vaguely popular while helping people. But even she admits it's mostly a facade to gain acceptance, but is reassured that if she wears the mask long enough, she'll become that person she wanted to be. The climax of the story involves all three of the protagonists inevitably giving up on trying to fit in, snapping at the cruelty of the student body and ending back up where they started; social outcasts. But Sena and Yozora become their first real friends to each other as adults after standing up for Sena at the Christmas party. Kodaka finally learns to be completely honest with himself and gets the shit beaten out of him for it, but is satisfied nonetheless. Sena caves under the pressure of appealing to the masses and returns to her god-complex. Rika placates her feelings for Kodaka realizing that she's satisfied just being his close friend. But all of them are friends and have been without necessarily realizing it. They even gained some friends outside of the Neighbor's Club. The series ends with them graduating and going to live their lives, happy that the Neighbor's Club and all the hell that took place happened.
As I said, I adored this manga series. Is it perfect? No. But it gave me a lot of nostalgia for my own troubled youth and my eventual stumbling into a group of misfits I could call my lifetime friends, even with all the garbage we've put each other through, whether it was for laughs or genuine anger. And more importantly, it sort of demonstrated to me how nostalgia and the past can be a poison that can keep you from moving forward in your life. It has a lot of heart when it's not trying to make you laugh, and the drama never feels too heavy for that reason. But it's heavy enough to be invested in this band of losers. And powering through all 20 volumes of it in the course of the week helped placate my severe depression, so it'll remain a happy memory for that reason.