Content Warning: Bondage Mild Sexual Content Misogyny Intro Ill be the first to admit that a show like this is outside of my usual wheelhouse but thats because I was kinda duped into watching Dagashi Kashi. A few months ago I went on a binge downloading as many yuri anime as I could find. And I didnt realize it until watching this show but the tag Mostly Female Cast applies to runofthemill heterosexual fantasy slop doesnt it? That combined with the cover art having the two women front and center lured me in. And Dagashi Kashi turned out...fine? The most damning thing I can say about Dagashi Kashi is that its not bad enough to be bad nor good enough to be good Doing Too Much with Too Little Dagashi Kashi wants to be four different things romance sliceoflife comedy and edutainment. The romance fell pretty flat for me. Hotaru Shidare is a fun if eccentric female lead and while shes entertaining she only ever gets to do one thing infodump about candy. Every plot beat revolves around snacks. Every joke revolves around snacks. Its charming but it gets to the point where it genuinely gets in the way of everything else. Saya Endou has some great character moments and her cafe could pair well thematically with the protagonists candy store but they never get any lengthy emotional moments. Everything that happens is solely in her own head and while thats relatable its also kind of sad as shes absolutely not the fan favorite do an image search for this show if you dont believe me. Tying this into the reason that the slice of life fails its the protagonist. A man so generic and bland that I wont even respect him enough to say his name. Over the span of twelve episodes he gets zero meaningful characterization and zero growth. He wants to be a manga author yet that comes up exactly four times and none of them are important plot beats beyond the setup. Hes shy sexually frustrated uncomfortable around women and dull as dishwater. Yet Hotaru and Saya fawn over him because presumably theres no other teen guys in town. I understand this is endemic to the genre. Protagonists like him are meant to be paper cutouts you can stick your face through. But if youre not a teen boy desperately trying to ignore the gnawing gender dysphoria eating away at her then this completely falls flat. A good romance in my opinion needs both people to be actual characters. And because this protagonist sucks the romance falls flat. Similarly good sliceoflife needs a character to either be invested in the mundanity of their life or to do something interesting. This protagonist doesnt want to manage the snack shop and he doesnt go anywhere of note. Theres no life to slice up here hes just a kinda pathetic teenager. So is Dagashi Kashis comedy any good? Ehhhhhhh. Not really. The gags in this show boil down to three types generic moment reference or candy advertisement. The generic moments are standard bits youd see anywhere. A pool episode a character getting sick an easily scared character being shown scary things. Theyre harmless but not exactly noteworthy. The references are more frustrating as often the joke is simply the fact that something is being referenced. Look Its scenes from Gundam 0079 but with snackthemed zakus Oh wow look at that She made a JoJos Bizarre Adventure reference Ahaha It gets old pretty quickly is all Ill say. And the final bleeds into the last segment. Dagashi Kashi is fifty snack advertisements dressed up in a trench coat. Theres no disguising it. The only other review even mentions as much. Huge chunks of this show are just Hotaru or the protagonist rambling on and on about the history behind a specific kind of candy why its so yummy and unique and why you should buy it. This is where the house of cards falls apart. Each episode twentysix minutes is actually split apart into two miniepisodes eleven minutes minus the intro outro and title cards. Each miniepisode has at least one maybe two sometimes three different candy advertisement monologues. Again being generous thats another two minutes of each miniepisode dedicated to factoids. That leaves nine minutes and only nine minutes. Those nine minutes are split roughly evenly into gags sliceoflife and romance scenes. Gags often get their full time but the sliceoflife and romance are sharing their time with the plot setups and payoffs. Meaning each miniepisode only has three to five minutes of character moments dialogue and scenes divorced from bits and ads. Thats absurdly little and no wonder noone feels like theyve changed. Which is kind of sad because I kinda honestly like whats here. Meet Potential Show Its Got so Much Potential Dagashi Kashi isnt rotten or more aptly middling to the core. Theres stuff here that could have worked. For one the opening and ending themes are excellent. Theyre both exciting and catchy pieces of music. The animation in them is also a lot more whimsical Im still wondering if there was any symbolism to the Alice in Wonderland stuff. The general soundtrack also wasnt too bad. Its probably pretty generic if youre into sliceoflife slop but as an outsider I noticed how cozy some of the songs felt. While I did shit on the protagonist the cast as a whole is pretty good. Hotaru and Saya are genuinely interesting characters and Id actually love to know more about them. Sayas brother is a bundle of frustrating character traits Im never a fan of onenote perverts but he somehow manages to have some genuine conversational chemistry. And the protagonists father while hardly present after the first episode is a fun foil to not just him but to Hotaru as well. Its genuinely impressive how entertaining the few scenes the father had with Hotaru were compared to how dry his son is in every social interaction. And for what its worth the show goes down easy. This is some incredibly digestible slop. I got through the first season of Dagashi Kashi in only three days and its because this anime is prime lowstakes time wasting. I could look away to check an email or idly grind levels in an RPG and not need to worry about missing anything at all. I dont typically watch anime on a second monitor but if thats your jam youll probably love this show. The YuriBait Within To those bold enough to brave the mountains of goonslop its well known that this too can be yuri. Love triangles where the lesbian pair has more chemistry than the straight pairs are a pretty common phenomenon and Im gonna be honest I wish this was Dagashi Kashi was a lesbian show. Hotaru and Saya have such a fun dynamic and they get some oddly emotional moments compared to the protagonist. Sayas constantly blushing around Hotaru their conversations tend to feel more impactful and I dont know. I truly think this would be better had it been a simple backandforth affair between these two. And I dont really have a better place to put this but why do these two look like stick figures? Come on Dagashi Kashi had such a good opportunity. Hotaru eats snacks 24/7 and Saya works a day job managing an entire cafe by herself. This could have been peak fat and smart rich business woman stumbles into the arms of a simple hometown oddly lucky cafe manager Ill save you the fanfic but I was genuinely disappointed that these two while having some notable traits like Sayas eyes look so generic. Final Thoughts Dagashi Kashi really isnt worth watching. But its also not worth avoiding. Its slop plain and simple. If its your preferred genre of choiceyoull eat it up. And even if its not it wont hurt you. While I ended up enjoying my time with this anime I feel as if part of that was in spite of the actual show. I had fun with the character scenes and doodled in my diary during the duller moments. And I probably had more fun drawing art of the two women than I did actually watching the anime. Its a chemistryless romance. An unfunny comedy. A lifeless sliceoflife. And probably a step below reading a wikipedia article on japanese candy. But if you grew up watching random slop anime borrowed from your library like me then its comforting in the same way that those shows were.