I have a problem with Hikigaya Hachiman. Not with the character himself per se, I think he’s a well written, multi-faceted and unique character that stands out among a sea of mindless self insert light novel protagonists. But rather, I take issue with the way that a certain contingent of Oregairu fans view Hachiman. Inevitably, you will see no shortage of people in youtube comments, reddit threads or wherever people discuss anime these days where people express how much they relate to Hachiman and how they think he’s such a great guy and they want to be like him. On the flip side, you have people who castigate Oregairu for being excessively edgy and glorifying anti-social behaviour. I can’t help but feel like these people have completely missed the point of Oregairu. It’s pretty clear that if you idolise Hachiman and think he’s someone worth emulating, you have grossly missed the point of the story that Watari, the author of the original light novels, is trying to tell.
To be clear, I’m not trying to say that there’s anything wrong with relating to Hachiman. When I watched Oregairu for the first time as a dumb teenager back in 2013, I too was in this camp of people who really liked Hachiman and thought he was some cool dude. It’s very easy to understand why people are drawn to Hachiman as a character. He’s smart, adept at reading social situations and seemingly very self-confident in the loner lifestyle. It’s really no wonder that this type of character resonates with a lot of the anime watching community. On average, I would wager that types of people who get really drawn to anime, especially from a young age, probably aren’t the most, one could say, socially adept. Watching anime is definitely not something that “normies” do. A lot of this comes from my own personal experience growing up and watching Oregairu during my early teens. I was never really the type of person who had a lot of friends or was particularly good at socialising with people, two things that are still pretty true about myself. More specifically, I had the same sort of internalised lack of self-worth that Hachiman does. From a young age, I was constantly labeled by teachers and authority figures as a problem child with personality issues. On these same teachers recommendations, I was shuttled between social workers and child psychologists in an attempt to “fix” my antisocial behaviour. At a certain point I came to believe that there was something fundamentally wrong with myself and that I was a bad person who wouldn’t be able to form normal social relationships.
From the very first monologue Hachiman gives about youth being alive, my teenage self was enamoured with Oregairu. Watching Oregairu felt like watching someone who truly understood my situation. From his cynical outlook to the way he sits alone in the classroom with his headphones in to the awkwardness the underpins much of his interactions with Yui and Yukino. Hachiman seemed like a character that understood the type of life I had. I loved how Hachiman seemingly effortlessly maneuvered through social situations without caring at all how other people saw him. I wanted so badly to be like Hachiman. Even though I was eventually able to make friends and even have romantic relationships, in retrospect, I think this desire to be someone who was aloof and didn’t care for how people saw me was ultimately detrimental to my ability to form genuine and meaningful relationships with others. I tried to build a facade like Hachiman. On the outside I wanted to seem self-possessed, independent and almost “above” other people. But on the inside I was deeply insecure and wanted genuine relationships. Even if I couldn’t articulate it back then, it was that internal conflict that likely drew me to Oregairu.
I’m not going to claim to be some galaxy brain literary expert who understands every detail of what Watari is trying to convey, but when you look beyond the surface, it’s fairly clear that Oregairu is not an endorsement of Hachiman’s lifestyle, in fact it’s really much more of a ringing rebuke. All of the memes about Hachiman being batman no doubt probably distorted people’s view of the show. While the 8man worship was certainly much more prevalent during the period in 2013–2015 where the second season had not finished airing, you can still see bits of the themes that are reinforced in season two. Consider why the service club even exists. The club’s reason for being is to rectify Hachiman’s belief system. Yukino and Hiratsuka both know Hachiman has a problem and make the club to help him. If you go back to the very first episode, Hachiman is forced to join the club because he wrote a terrible essay. That seems like a pretty flimsy justification. Hirastuka then waits outside the club room until she senses that Yukino is hitting a wall with trying to get Hachiman to join the club. She then reappears to make the bet between Hachiman and Yukino to see which of them can help the most people. A bet that was so important apparently she completely forgets about it in the second season.
This all starts coming together when it’s revealed that it was Yukino’s car that hit Hachiman on the first day of school. Undoubtedly a part of Yukino’s reason for starting the service club is guilt, but I think it goes beyond that. Going back again to the first episode, isn’t it kind of odd that Yukino claims to have no idea who Hachiman is, but seems to have a perfectly good sense of who Yui is? The service club is created because Yukino watches the guy who threw himself in front of a car to save a stranger’s dog act like a friendless, cynical degenerate. Is it any wonder she thinks something is grossly wrong with this guy? Hiratsuka is more than happy to play along because she knows better than anyone else that Hachiman’s attitude is only going to make problems for him in the future.
Even though season one is generally considered to play more into the comedy part of “My Teen Romantic Comedy”, if you look deeper, the core themes of the second season are already apparent.. Despite his insistence to the contrary, Hachiman clearly has reservations with the philosophy he claims to unabashedly embrace. We see this most clearly after he confronts Sagami on the roof during the culture festival. Hachiman embraces self-sacrifice as a way to solve problems not because he enjoys being a social outcast or something, it’s because he’s internalised that it’s worth constantly throwing himself under the bus because no one cares about him. Even though Hachiman’s interventions at the summer camp or the culture festival are considered “successes”, has he really meaningfully made the situation better? He may have preserved Rumi’s friend group for the time being, but when she reappears in the second season, she’s back to being shunned by her peers. Sagami hasn’t really learned anything from her abject failure as the culture festival committee chairmen. Hachiman is obsessed with preserving the status quo, even when that status quo goes directly against the value system he claims to follow. It’s this fixation on preserving the status quo at the cost of himself that ends up being Hachiman’s undoing in the second season.
The Ebina confession arc is designed to show us the contradictions and instability of Hachiman’s belief system. Hachiman spends the entire first season monologuing about how much he despises fake relationships. But when push comes to shove, he sacrifices his own dignity to save Hayato’s friend group. A friend group that, by Hachiman’s own standards, doesn’t deserve to exist if it can’t handle a confession to Ebina. Hachiman then spends the next episodes resorting to increasingly underhanded and manipulative tactics to get Iroha to win the student council election under the guise that he’s doing it to preserve the service club and the status quo. Yukino understands that if she wins the election, the three of them can just move to the student council. Fundamentally nothing about their relationship would change. But Hachiman ends up prioritising saving the room of the service club over his own integrity. Even though Hachiman tries to reassure himself that nothing is wrong and he likes the direction things are going, he knows deep down that things are wrong. One of my favourite moments in the show is when Hachiman goes to the vending machine to buy Max coffee, only to buy a different brand. Hachiman is simultaneously trying to convince himself that he would be fine with change while signalling to the audience that something is deeply wrong. In a nutshell, Hachiman’s belief system is fatally flawed and his increasingly self-destructive and contradictory behaviour in season two is designed to demonstrate that.
But being the dumb 14 year old that I was, I was completely unable to recognize the myriad of problems with Hachiman’s outlook or even the message the story was trying to convey. Oregairu as a story is heavily reliant on the reader to draw their own conclusions and read between the lines. Much of the content and nuance is already lost in the transition from the light novel to the anime with key scenes and details left out. I think one of Watari’s greatest strengths is how he’s constructed Oregairu so different people can enjoy it on vastly different levels. One way to experience Oregairu is to shift through the nuance and deep dive into the characters and interactions. Another way is to just enjoy watching Hachiman seem cool while mentally deciding which girl you think is the prettiest. But herein lies the greatest irony with Oregairu. The people who would benefit the most from understanding Hachiman’s character are also the least likely to be able to draw the conclusions necessary to understand the show on a deeper level. I know that when I watched season 2 as a still equally dumb teenager, I didn’t get much out of it. I’ve only really been able to fully appreciate Oregairu, rewatching it years later after I’ve had years to mature as a person. One of the greatest revelations I had watching the show a second time is how I came to better understand the deep flaws within Oregairu’s cast. I can see the worst parts myself within the characters of Oregairu. I have Hachiman’s relentless cynicism. Yukino’s penchant for dependence and reliance on others and Hayato’s desire for approval. But what’s changed between when now and when I first watched Oregairu five years ago is that I’m self aware of my own shortcomings as a person. But I would wager that your typical Hachiman idolizer is probably pretty young, probably middle or highschool aged. They probably don’t have many friends so naturally they latch onto the most obvious parts of Hachiman’s character: his hatred of “nice girls” and vapid youth relationships without thinking deeply about the narrative or having the self awareness to see the flaws in Hachiman’s worldview.
If I haven’t made it clear, I’m not trying to say that there’s anything wrong with being a loner or that Oregairu idolises normiedom or something. At his core, Hachiman is really just a typical guy. We see this in his interactions with Komachi. He doesn’t have to pretend to be anything with her. Hachiman genuinely wanted to try to live a normal high school life, only for things to be horribly derailed. It’s completely understandable how someone like Hachiman, who was constantly rejected and ostracized to develop the jaded, cynical view on life that he does. Fundamentally, Hachiman cares about the people around him. But because of his warped view of himself, he believes that self-sacrifice is the best way to solve these problems. Even though he can’t see it, there are plenty of people in Hachiman’s life who care about him from Yukino to Yui to Hiratsuka to Totsuka and his inability to see that ends up hurting the people closest to him. If there’s anything to be taken away from Oregairu, it’s the importance of vulnerability and honesty in forming meaningful relationships.
When I’m writing this, season 3 has only barely begun so things could look drastically different when the show ends, but there’s no doubt an entire contingent of people who like Oregairu for the “wrong reasons”. On the one hand, I have a great deal of respect for Watari and the story he’s trying to tell. In an industry saturated with mindless self insert protagonist and braindead Isekai plotlines, it takes a certain courage to write a story that beats to the sound of its own drum. But if someone watches Oregairu and comes away with the message that it’s cool to be like Hachiman and there’s nothing wrong with what he’s doing, is that a failure on the part of Watari? If a writer is trying to convey a certain point or message, is the onus on the writer to make that apparent? As a more extreme example, let’s take the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit which is about a young boy growing up in Nazi Germany who has Hitler as his imaginary friend. If you’ve watched the movie you would know that it in no way endorses Nazi ideology, to the contrary it’s a satirical critique of Nazism. But imagine if Jojo Rabbit was written in a way where a sizeable contingent of the audience walks away with the message that being a Nazi cool rather than tremendously evil. I think most people would agree that that would be a failure on the part of the film. To a much less serious degree you have the same dilemma with Oregairu. The way that Watari has chosen to structure his story and the way he has chosen to tell that story, has led to a sizable group of people who take the exact wrong message away from the story. And the great irony of this whole situation, as I said before, is that the people who need to internalize Watari’s message are the people least likely to have the emotional maturity to see the necessary nuance to get that message. This creates a situation where even though Oregairu is incredibly well written and a compelling work of narrative fiction, I would also argue that it fails from a thematic standpoint. I certainly think that at least a part of Watari’s rationale for writing Oregairu was to serve as a cautionary tale to discourage people from going down the path of unbridled cynicism that Hachiman starts the series on. Ultimately, I think that the open question Oregairu leaves regarding authorial intent is another reason why I find this work so fascinating.
