In a time of my life where finding legitimately funny anime has been getting harder and harder, Nozaki hit at pretty much the perfect time. Its a slice of life comedy about a high school guy who draws shoujo manga professionally, and thats pretty much the whole concept. I guess its technically a romance, since the main girl finds out about this secret life through a botched confession, and her feelings remain present throughout the entire thing. But at its core, Nozaki spends most of its time around its ecclectic cast and their interactions
While you do get a lot of time focused on the characters as a whole, it typically splits them off into groups. You have the primary one: Chiyo/Nozaki and usually Mikoshiba when he gets focus. The secondary: Seo/Wakamatsu. And the one thats okay but you just kind of want to go back to the other two when theyre on: Kashima/Hori. Really, the entire cast is great, and the shows at its strongest when playing to the strengths that come about their interactions. Mikoshiba is probably my favorite. Hes a standard fujoshi-bait dude who gives really dumb one-liners and then gets embarrassed about it, which is an odd character trait to say the least, but it never gets old. Nozaki is great too, mainly because of how dense he is. He actually bases characters in his manga on his friends, but uses Mikoshiba as inspiration for his female leads. Its also hilarious to see his roundabout ways of storytelling to prevent inconsistencies within his manga. One of the most memorable gags to me was when he drew a page of the lead character stating how popular it had become to stand on boxes, in order to prevent issues with size scaling of his characters. I think thats how it went, at least.
Anyway, its a really funny show. One of the better to come out in the past few years, with a fantastic cast of characters. For a hot minute, it looked like the same staff struck gold with the similar Tada-kun Never Falls in Love, but they pretty much showed how inept they are at writing original comedy, holy shit Im still pissed about that show. Either way, a new season of Nozaki is necessary, please Doga Kobo.