Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki Is a Delightful Blend of Heart and Humor

Funimation

As an extraordinarily shy, awkward, absentminded youth, there’s nothing I would have loved more than a wise and savvy friend taking me under their wing and showing me the ropes of the wild, terrifying ride that was the high school social sphere. Alas, no such friend materialized for me, but in the case of the eponymous character of anime series Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki, that’s exactly what happens.

Fumiya Tomozaki is a high schooler who has spent his school years as a loner, and, for the most part, he’s fine with that. When he’s not in school, Tomozaki is playing the popular video game Attack Families, also known as TackFam (an analogue to real-world melee game Super Smash Bros.); when we meet him, we find he’s been the top player in the country for some time. His life changes in a big way, though, when he meets the second-place player on the leaderboard, Aoi Hinami, in real life. As it turns out, Hinami is a classmate of Tomozaki’s and has observed him and his loner ways. IRL, Hinami is the perfect high schooler—she’s top of her class, she’s beloved by all, and she has set her sights on becoming student council president. When the two meet, Hinami has a proposition for Tomozaki: if he’ll teach her how to optimize her TackFam skills even further, she’ll teach him how to play the game called life. Tomozaki hesitantly agrees, and Hinami proceeds to schedule him for regular after-school meetings full of earnest, tough-love lessons on her tried-and-true strategies for a successful social life, complete with challenges and video-game-style achievements (such as talking to the same potential friend three times in one day, texting the girl he has a crush on, or going on a class trip).

I had a few expectations about how I thought this series would go when I started watching it, and most of them were turned on their heads, in the best way possible. I figured it would be a cute, lighthearted anime with some goofy characters and some so-awkward-it’s-hilarious shenanigans—and it definitely was that. However, I also expected to see a few of the pitfalls that tend to plague anime series like this one, but in almost all cases, they either didn’t materialize or were subverted in smart and surprising ways.

First, I figured that, in her quest to teach Tomozaki the game of life (or, essentially, to teach him how to become popular), Hinami would talk down to Tomozaki, or that her tough love would turn into ridicule, all in the name of “helping” him. But though Hinami does make some questionable decisions when guiding Tomozaki and sometimes tries to push him too far, never once does she stoop to mockery, though so many like her would have done so without a second thought. Instead, she speaks to Tomozaki in his own gamer-ified language, like when she gives him the aforementioned challenges or talks to him about social concepts in terms of gaming strategy. It’s one of the main things that makes the series the satisfying, refreshing watch that it is. And in fact, in the moments where Hinami starts to push up against Tomozaki’s boundaries in her quest to improve his overall savoir faire, Tomozaki stands up to her in an earnest, healthy, and unwavering way—and he’s able to do it in large part because of the confidence he finds through Hinami’s lessons.

My next upended supposition came with the side characters—there are countless series out there (anime and otherwise) in which the side characters, even when they are objectively interesting or make good foils for the protagonist, tend to be little more than set pieces, and this series seemed likely to fall into that trap. I was pleasantly surprised to find, however, that many of the side characters were just as well developed as the two protagonists. Throughout Tomozaki’s development over the course of the series, we also get many detailed glimpses into the journeys of several of his friends (and, in some cases, frenemies) that show them as fully realized, genuine characters in their own right. Their stories aren’t there just to further Tomozaki’s plot (though they do do that as well, at times); they show both the depth and complexity that is social life in high school. And they show Tomozaki something that not even Hinami ends up being able to teach him—namely, that there’s no one right way to have a successful and fulfilling high school experience, even with (and perhaps because of) the inevitable bumps along the way.

The last primary expectation that was turned upside down for me came down to Tomozaki himself. I could have easily seen the show either having Tomozaki “revert” to more or less who he was before meeting Hinami and double down on some of his less-healthy tendencies or, more likely, having him become someone who would be unrecognizable to his former self (and not as much in a “personal growth” kind of way as in a “Sandy from Grease” kind of way). Instead, we got a realistically balanced blend of the two—after his time with Hinami, Tomozaki is able to come to a place in himself where he is at ease with the things that make him who he is (even the parts Hinami tried hardest to convince him he needed to overcome or get rid of) and is also stronger, more grounded, and more confident. Through Hinami’s teaching, he’s able to identify and retain the things that always made him the great person he is, while also taking in what Hinami had to teach him and synthesizing it to become his most genuine, open self, not abandoning TackFam but no longer hiding behind it to avoid engaging with his friends and classmates either. Not only that—in the later episodes, there are a few key moments where it’s clear that Tomozaki has transformed from student into teacher. For example, when Tomozaki’s friend Izumi asks him to help her learn how to play TackFam better so that she can spend more time with her crush, Nakamura (who is Tomozaki’s rival and nearly as obsessed with—if not as skilled at—TackFam), he not only helps her improve her game, but he imparts some of the wisdom and confidence he learned when he was hanging out with Hinami and, in so doing, helps Izumi even more than either one of them thought he would.

In the end, while this series does have its weak points (some of the usual weird non sequiturs that tend to crop up in series like this, a few moments in which some of Tomozaki’s friends act out of character, and some inexplicable moments of fanservice), overall it’s a fresh take on the high school anime genre, it’s full of realistic and relatable moments, and it’s populated by a cast of characters I kind of wish I could be friends with. I’d recommend this one to anyone looking for a feel-good series. For those already familiar with high school anime, this has all the aspects that make the genre great, with plenty of features that keep it from being “just another high school anime”; and for those who are new to the genre, this series would make a great entry point. I’m already finding myself wanting to rewatch it, both to relive the fun and to pick up on even more of the connections and messages this series has to offer.