YMMV / Hidamari Sketch

• Angst? What Angst?: Nazuna's parents leaving her doesn't affect her all that much after the initial explanation. In fact, when her parents come back to visit her, being able to cook a proper meal for them was a bigger concern than asking them if they made the right choice! Though they do show that they don't need to worry too much given how much they approve of her friends at Hidamari.
• Awesome Music:
  • Hoshimittsu's opening is more this than the usual ear worm.
  • Masaki Endoh just sang the hotblooded version.
  • Meta: One Fan Vid decided to do a hotblooded song that would be a counterbalance to the show's saccharine nature. The song? Straight Outta Compton. (Before you ask, it was uploaded years before the movie was released.)
• Crazy Is Cool: Miyako likes doing mundane things in bizarre ways. In the sports festival, she choose to balance on top of the ball rather than push it by hand, and form a human pyramid in the ball throwing competition.
• Cult Classic: Almost 20 years after its original manga released and over 15 years after its anime, it remains a classic anime series that is fondly remembered as a undermined pioneer of its genre, publisher, and studio, even if it has faded into obscurity over the years and never was quite as big as some of its contemporaries or successors, regardless of its historical status. This mainly applies to everywhere outside of Japan.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Despite her being a minor character in the manga and having only introduced in the anime in the third season, fans have latched onto Arisawa like moss to a rock.
  • Word of God: She had Arisawa give her cell phone number to Yuno because she was popular among Japanese readers.
• Fan Nickname: Wideface for the iconic kind of Super-deformation.
• First Installment Wins: In terms of the series as a whole, it isn't too hard to find fans of the Kirara brand who rank it as their best anime. At the bare minimum, most Kirara fans place it towards the top of their canon.
  • The first season can sometimes be seen as this, thanks to it's charming low budget direction and lack of polish that makes it stand out compared to its three sequels.
• Genre Turning Point: The anime adaptation was released at a time where Schoolgirl Series were slowly on the rise (premiering a season before Lucky Star). It was also the first manga from Manga Time Kirara to be adapted to an anime (the magazine itself only being a few years old at that point), and Studio Shaft was still building their identity as an anime studio. Due to the anime's unexpected success, it later inspired Kirara to greenlight more of their manga into becoming anime on a yearly basis, some of which became among the most beloved releases of their respective years, while it would also help Shaft develop their signature style that would pave the way for anime such as Puella Magi Madoka Magica. Due to its relative obscurity outside of Japan, its contribution to anime history is mostly overlooked.
• Ho Yay: The series—especially the anime—has enough of those that we have a special page for that.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • OH GOD MY NUTBLADDER^ExplanationFrom a hilarious thread◊ on /a/ where OP claimed his "nutbladder"—variously identified by him as his "penis engine", the "wiring behind [his] penis", and his "bladder that hold the man essence"—had been wrecked from too many Moe-induced dates with Miss Palms.
  • Also, "oh god yoshinoya is hot"
  • "Ume-sensei hates Natsume."
  • The fansubs for the first season extended this by adding memetic comments from a familiar source throughout.
  • Wider^ExplanationThe cast regularly enter a Super-Deformed Art Shift that has their heads be rather horizontally wide for emphasis. Soon enough imageboards and online posting around the series started editing their heads to be even wider, to the point that there's virtually a whole category of memes and fanart around "wide" Hidamari Sketch characters, or other series getting their characters drawn in a similar style.
• Seasonal Rot: Even with the additions of Nazuna and Nori, season 3 slowly started the series decline in quality with slight less clever moments and dialogue.
  • Season 4 hasn't been as clever, either. Some fans have admitted the characters are becoming generic (especially Yuno), the Once per Episode moments becoming repetitively tedious, being way too lighthearted and adding more pointless bath scenes have hurted the season. It also didn't help that it skipped over a good section of the manga (some of which is hinted in the season's OP) in favor of setting up Hiro and Sae's eventual graduation. The OP is also much less memorable and catchy than its predecessors.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Hidamari Sketch x 365 gains a lot by better comedic timing and greater focus on the relationships between the main characters.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Get through the Sae and Hiro's graduation episodes, especially Natsume and Sae saying good-bye, without crying. I dare you!
    • It's just as powerful in the manga, despite the 4koma format, as every emotion is perfectly conveyed without dialogue.
  • The strip where Miyako enters Sae's now-empty apartment and cries at the realization that Sae and Hiro have moved away is the single saddest moment in the series.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Little Girls?: This series is very clean— however, this is a seinen series aired in Otaku O'Clock.
• The Woobie:
  • Yuno can also be one at times when she's low on confidence.
  • And then there's Natsume, who can attest first-hand that love hurts.
  • Nori. At least in episode 8 of Honeycomb wherein nearly every bad thing to happen at the festival happens to her.