The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Dreaming Boy is a Realist

High school student Wataru Sajō is in love with his gorgeous classmate Aika Natsukawa. Aika finds him to be a nuisance, but he dreams of her mutual love every day and continues to approach her. One day though, he suddenly wakes up from this "dream." In order to get back his sense of reality, he recognizes his position and stays away from Aika. But now, for some reason, Aika is completely shaken.

The Dreaming Boy Is a Realist is based on Okemaru's Yumemiru light novel series. It streams on HIDIVE on Mondays.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this as a first episode. It's incredibly positive that protagonist Wataru has realized that stalking his classmate and crush Aika is not an okay thing to do, but it's less comfortable that people are apparently upset with him that he's no longer stalking her. There's an odd disconnect to these two attitudes showcased in the episode that makes for an uneasy viewing experience – especially since Aika seems to number among those who aren't thrilled with the change in Wataru.

Now, if Aika really did enjoy Wataru's attention, that's perfectly okay – everyone likes different things, after all. But the awkwardness lies in how the action is presented here. Everyone makes a big deal out of Wataru's change in attitude, with Aika even coming by his house to see what's going on. If they'd been playing a mutual game, wherein he was over-the-top about his feelings for her and she pretended to be left cold by them, that'd be one thing. But the way it's shown is confusing, especially if you don't immediately get that the whole soccer ball scene the episode opens with is meant to be a metaphorical bolt from the blue. And frankly, it took me a second to register that Wataru didn't somehow have psychic time-slowing powers, although upon reflection it's not a bad way to show him suddenly realizing that his behavior just isn't okay.

There's also the issue of Rena, an older girl who begins (and ends) her own low-key stalking of Wataru in order to…make her longtime boyfriend jealous after he made an off-the-cuff comment while talking with some other guys? I'm not entirely sure, not am I certain what the point of Rena is. To show Wataru how unpleasant it can be to have someone follow you around? Maybe, but he's already come to that conclusion on his own. To make Aika jealous? Again, it's possible, but nothing else in the episode leads us to believe that she enjoys his attention, at least not until the end when she shows up at his door. All that it really seems to do is make the episode drag from stultifying conversation to stultifying conversation while the plot languishes by the roadside.

This isn't entirely without potential. Aika and Wataru having to actually think about their interactions with each other could be a good story on its own, especially since both of them seem to be doing some soul searching. But this isn't a very engaging episode, relying too heavily on chatter between people who aren't particularly interesting and who we don't yet know well enough to care about. I suspect this works better in the original novels.

“Someone like Aizawa, who seems kind of naughty at first glance, but has a presence where friendliness and charm merges together, is a man's ideal. To have the time to come into contact with that kind of girl is like a reward, you know?”

I want you to take a minute to soak in that pair of sentences. If you've got enough experience reading stilted or machine translations, you can probably parse it quickly enough, but it almost certainly took some effort to figure what, exactly, it's trying to say. If you didn't grow up reading thrice-translated manga scans, it might take a bit longer to wrap your head around. That is what basically every line of dialogue in this premiere is like. I'm not fluent in Japanese, so I can't say if this is the fault of overly-literal translation, or if the original text was just as clunky and over-written. What I can say is that it made every minute of this a chore to get through, as a bunch of boring teenagers strung together labyrinthine paragraphs to express such complicated emotions as “I like a girl” or “I got angry with my boyfriend” in the most inefficient ways possible.

Buried underneath the terrible dialogue is what barely qualifies as a story. The big hook is that Wataru has apparently spent months clinging to a girl who constantly rejects him, both of them freely calling him a “stalker,” and he's finally decided to stop doing that. This is, for some reason, shocking and upsetting to everyone else, including the girl he was pestering, because I guess she actually does like him but was too tsundere to admit it. It's such a bizarre setup that I spent much of the episode thinking there had to be some supernatural twist. Maybe the opening sequence with the random soccer ball turning into fireworks was literal, and not just a terribly belabored metaphor? Perhaps there were some metaphysical shenanigans going on where suddenly the whole world revolved around this annoying schmuck constantly bothering the prettiest girl in class. That would honestly make more sense than what was happening on screen, since it would be an actual story with stakes. Surely you couldn't construct an entire show on such a paper-thin, easily resolved premise, right?

Yet here we are. The actual hook of this rom-com is that accidentally playing hard to get will apparently trick girls into liking you, no matter how much they insisted they hated your guts and demanded you leave them alone beforehand. Who needs a romance with actual personality or chemistry when you can just arbitrarily have characters be in love despite not actually liking each other's company. This episode also feature a half-baked subplot where a random girl starts pretending to flirt with Wataru, much to Aika's blank-faced chagrin, because she wanted to make her boyfriend jealous for saying another girl was “his type” or something. To be fair, that's the kind of petty, poorly considered stuff actual teenagers get up to all the time. To be unfair, nobody here talks like an actual teenager, and real teens are largely boring, so their petty drama isn't worth making TV shows about.

We've made a lot of jokes about AI-created anime around here, especially when it comes to the isekai and magic high school genres that are en vogue for the last few years. But there's another up-and-coming genre: an unremarkable protagonist ends up dating the most popular girl in his class because reasons. The Dreaming Boy Is a Realist has the ignoble distinction of feeling like the first of those to be produced with as little human labor as possible.

Oh, I don't mean visually, or even in terms of its basic plot; those were clearly produced by human hands, albeit ones that were either unskilled or lacking in time, resources, or originality. The animation has the same slightly glowy sheen to it that I've come to associate with poorly-managed productions trying to disguise flat, off-model animation like in Atelier Ryza and Am I Actually the Strongest? The most remarkable thing about the character designs are the ugly school uniforms that use two clashing shades of blue. And only a human mind would choose to insert a completely extraneous plot about a girl breaking up with and getting back together with her boyfriend, just so the vaguely irritating protagonist can have someone to bounce his thoughts off of.

But that music! Usually, the worst I can say about background music in anime is, “I didn't really notice it,” but here, it actively grated on my nerves. It sounded like it came from a royalty-free music library conceived in the depths of hell to distract and annoy me as much as possible. I cannot, will not believe that anyone actually paid money for this crime against my eardrums.

I suspect the dialogue lacks any humanity or wit, considering how much of it is about how the whole school is rooting for Wataru to stalk this poor girl who keeps telling him to screw off. However, even if it had any, it would have been totally obscured by the shockingly bad translation. I know that sometimes people disagree with certain localization choices or find them inaccurate, but that's not what's happening here. This is borderline incomprehensible, to the point I can only suspect there was machine translation involved. The sentences tangle around one another, attempting to replicate sentence structure in grammatical English. They're punctuated like someone spilled a bucket of commas and semicolons and barely bothered to clean them up. “I feel like somewhere in my heart, there's a me who's cooled off, from being rejected too much.”

You know these things are bad when they distract me from a story that reiterates some truly heinous tropes: a girl getting mad when the boy who won't leave her alone finally listens when she tells him to get out of her face. There's nothing redeeming about this one, folks.

I've said it a thousand times before but shows like The Dreaming Boy Is a Realist is one of those anime that forces me to reiterate just how incredibly difficult it is to make things like chemistry and romantic compatibility work in an animated medium. Like many a terrible rom-com before it, The Dreaming Boy Is a Realist seems to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between simply replicating a bunch of age-old archetypes and actually crafting a story and characters that are able to get the audience to feel the love that is supposed to be in the air. This, as you can imagine, makes for a very grating viewing experience.

Take our hero, for instance. Usually, in a romantic comedy like this, the lead protagonists start out at odds, maybe even actively disliking each other, which often makes their inevitable union that much sweeter. Sadly, since all of the other one-note gimmicks have already been used up twice over by other shows, the only personality trait that Dreaming Boy could come up with for its hero, Wataru Sanjo, is that he self-identifies as a “stalker”. Thankfully, he isn't, like, a literal danger to his love interest Aika's safety or anything; he's just an annoying dweeb who won't stop talking to Aika and following her around, no matter how many times she begs him to stop. To the show's credit, the whole point of this first episode is for Wataru to finally learn the incredibly difficult lessons of “Don't Be an Obnoxious Weirdo”, but this has the counterintuitive effect of highlighting even further just how boring and lame of a protagonist he is, and how fundamentally mismatched he is with Aika. As for the love interest herself, she somehow has even less personality than Wataru. As it turns out, there's more to being a successful tsundere type than simply harboring a deep and, honestly, very justified dislike of the main character.

It doesn't help that the show's production values are whack, too. The art is boring and lifeless, there is absolutely no inspiration to be found in the direction of any scene, and the music is mixed way too loud, meaning that the already annoying doot doot doot doots of the generic soundtrack become genuinely painful to hear, sometimes. I'm not going to call this the most unpleasant show of the entire summer, because we still have two GoHands anime to suffer through, but The Dreaming Boy Is a Realist sucks pretty bad, all the same.

I'll be straight with you. Throughout this entire episode, a part of me dreaded the obvious twist: the big reveal that Wataru is actually some teenage psycho, playing the manipulative long con, that is playing hard to get to trick Aika into dating him. But that twist never came. In its absence, we have a first episode that has completely won me over.

From a cynical viewpoint, one could say this episode is about a boy who realizes stalking is bad. And while "stalking is bad" is something obvious and agreed upon by every rationally-minded person, that's not really what this show is about. It's not that Wataru realizes that stalking is bad; it's that he realizes that A) he is actually a stalker and B) he's hurting the person he supposedly cares about.

Simply put, everyone is the hero of their own story. This simple fact can blind any of us to the objective truth of our actions. Moreover, society at large teaches us to fight for love—to overcome all obstacles and bring it to fruition. His classmates are emblematic of this. Just look at how they treat his pursuit of her as some kind of romantic joke, completely disregarding her obvious discomfort. Herein lies the root of Wataru's problem. In Wataru's eyes, he wasn't stalking because stalking is something bad people do—and since he's not a bad person, he couldn't possibly be a stalker. He was merely being romantically persistent in his attempts to win Aika's heart.

But then, suddenly, he had a moment of epiphany—a moment where he realized that he was hurting the person he supposedly cared for with his actions. This is something both relatable and important. A vital part of growing up is realizing that you can't make the world how you want it to be simply by being persistent. The world is what it is, and all the people in it have their own thoughts and motivations independent of your own. Or, to put it another way, some people simply don't want to date you, and nothing you do will ever change that.

Of course, such a realization alone means nothing, so Wataru backs off completely. Sure, his feelings haven't changed, but his mindset and subsequent actions have. That is where this title comes from. He still has his dream of being with Aika but accepts the reality that she does not like him that way. It's a major coming-of-age moment. Going forward, this will be the story of Wataru leaving behind the child he was and becoming a better man. And perhaps, when he has reached the end of this path, he will find the girl of his dreams waiting for him.

Simply put, I'm 100% sold on this anime. I find it infinitely relatable with a great message about love, self-centeredness, and accepting the unfortunate realities of the world. Beyond that, who doesn't love seeing a story with positive character development from the get-go? If subsequent episodes are just him helping other people grow in different ways as well, I'll be more than satisfied.