Kuragehime

 

A group of friends bound by love, kindness and a lot of social anxiety. Tsukimi is an aspiring illustrator with a keen interest for everything jellyfish. Mayaya is obssessed with the Han dinasty and the Three Kingdoms period. Banba knows everything about trains. Jiji is always thinking about older, mature men. Chieko is a Ichimatsu doll collector and knows everything there is to know about kimonos. They all live together in an old fashioned inn owned by Chieko's mother. They're NEETs (thought they won't admit it) and spend the day mostly indoors, indulging in their hobbies. Once a week they all go out to the grocery store for supplies.

This is a very interesting group of friends and it's a delight to watch their failing to go outside and other shortcomings of no consequence. Here, social anxiety receives a lighthearted approach to a very nice effect. The chaos element in this rather uneventful, chilled group of people is Kuranosuke, a beautiful boy that looks better in a dress than most women. Little by little he finds his way into this group, bringing a new perspective to their lives, but mostly, at least at first, what he really brings is high quality kobe beef for the special dinner party at fridays. Things take off from there.

Kuragehime is an endearing slice of life comedy and the sparingly placed romance storyline is well played, making it a nice addition to the whole thing. There's plenty of funny situations at every corner with these characters and though you probably won't be laughing out loud all the time, it never fails to be an amusing watch.

What really makes it worthy though are the characters. They make a nice team of weirdos and we can't but find comfort that they found each other. The perfect NEET, nerd team. There should be whole episodes where we watch Chieko sewing new clothing for her dolls or Mayaya's jumping around her bedroom pretending to be one of the great generals of the Han dinasty. Unfortunately there isn't, but the anime is just the first volume of a 17 volumes long otaku friendship mostly indoor adventure, so if you like what you see here, the manga would be the next natural step.