(Both the manga and the anime are absolutely worth your time and this recommendation touches on both and what makes each unique.)

Bloom into You follows 15 year old Yuu in her first year of high school. She loves to read shojo manga and finds joy in seeing romances unfold in the pages of those stories, but she feels a deep frustration and guilt in her inability to reach and grasp those emotions herself. She understands the meaning behind the words, but the words are never 'hers'. When she confides in her senpai, Touko Nanami, about how to react to a confession from an old friend, Yuu's ecstatic to find someone who's also never fallen in love then confused and initially distraught to see Nanami quickly developing an attraction to her. Behind the front of student council formalities, Yuu and Nanami's relationship leaps from mere friendship to an odd, doting one-sided romance whose form wobbles and bends as both characters become more and more intimately familiar with how the other thinks, what kind of a person they are and the secrets they keep locked deep inside. Bloom into You, or "Eventually, I'll become you" (the less artful, blunter and more accurate translation of the Japanese title) is unique in that both Yuu and Nanami are drawn to the other girl's current self whilst chasing desperately to reinvent themselves, and that brings in a lot of fascinating questions about the difficulty of love in the face of change, sustaining a relationship with someone becoming a different 'them' to who you fell for.

I think the singular aspect of this series that this series absolutely nails is its characters. Almost all of the side characters are brimming with personality even when they get very little time to shine (there's more than just these but i'll keep to just three for the sake of being concise and dodging side characters whose appeal is best explained in more spoilerific terms)- Koyomi's a budding writer absorbed in writing a novel, at the expense of her sleep and schoolwork. Rei, Yuu's older sister, cottons on to Yuu's bubbling feelings and the broad strokes of the complexion of Yuu's dynamic with Nanami relatively early on and she's a very accepting and wholesome figure throughout the story. Maki's an asexual boy on the student council who takes great pride in watching Yuu care more and more for Nanami, cheering her on from the sidelines.

The side characters help ground the world and origins of the main characters, the real stars of the show. Yuu's quickly become one of my favourite protagonists in this medium and I don't quite have the words to place why. Part of it's the commitment to candidness and the deep mining of her thought process, something afforded to Nanami and Sayaka to an admirable degree too but pushed to 11 for the protagonist from whose perspective the story is told. As someone with a history of depression, the imagery of sinking and being unable to reach your feelings at the surface/trying to take flight but being tethered to the ground struck a personal chord, that's certainly a part of the affinity I have with her. There's also the unique way Bloom constructs her exclusion as self-inflicted and separates her from caring, loving friends not by their malice or ignorance but an aversion to confessing her experiences to people that couldn't be able to relate. More so than that, in a way I can't quite word, I feel a little piece of myself sparking, alive on the screen (or paper) when I watch (or read), a me I hadn't met before. Yuu is a me I'd be proud to become some day, and a person I couldn't be more thankful that I met.

Yuu may be outstanding, but Nanami more than pulls her weight too and her constant pressing and prodding of Yuu's limits, her fluctuation between her public and private faces, and the lifelike, human realism allotted to her mental health are another core artery in the heart of Bloom's appeal. Nanami isn't the perfect model student she'd like you to believe her to be, and it's convincingly conveyed that her academic, posh and pretty front is little more than a fragile facade. It inspires who she lets in under her armor: Yuu, whose inability to see anyone else as 'special' is a captivating reprieve to Nanami from her act; and her longtime friend, student council colleague and amazing third main character Sayaka Saeki, a trustworthy and perceptive friend who knows her boundaries and is fine not to tread any further than that despite the love she feels for Nanami. It's in supporting characters like Saeki where the series interacts most with sexuality, talking about how a bad experience can lead to repression and conveying the need for more and more representation to normalise homosexuality for kids just coming to terms with it. Surprisingly the main narrative doesn't really discuss homosexuality or the surrounding climate around it at all, beyond a little line near the beginning where Yuu's surprised about how comfortable she is with the concept of dating a woman, and a later line where Rei thinks about different family members and how accepting they would be in the situation that Yuu and Nanami's started publicly dating.

Bloom is a lot about tiptoeing around the philosophies that Nanami internalised in the wake of her past and building up to a point where softly, with love and care, the two of them can talk it out and confront those beliefs in a soft, careful and nurturing manner to work past them. It's more of a character study than a romance (certainly so for most of the parts covered by the show, at least) partly because of its focus on mental health. It asks its characters 'does the person you care for need a friend rather than a lover right now?' It's respectful and nuanced in its portrayal of mental health, it's not minimising, stigmatising or stereotyping, and its all about the long process of moving past such issues with the help of a few good friends.

To compare the manga and anime, first off I wanted to cover the dimensions of art and sound. The manga is better in that it captures emotion in its facial expressions in a much more subtle, precise and consistent way that makes the anime in certain scenes look sloppy in comparison and hamstrings the manga's outstanding
success at communicating detail with 'show don't tell'. The art in the anime is propped up by the backgrounds and the richness of the colour palette (both of which are absolutely gorgeous). The voice acting in the Japanese dub is genuinely stellar, emotional and personal and serves to compensate for where the animation of characters faces would dissolve the emotional punch of the manga. Michiru Oshima's soundtrack also serves to build a serene, mundane and peaceful atmosphere in the background to Yuu and Nanami's daily lives. It also knows when to shut up, and gains power in its scarcity and measured usage- some of the most powerful scenes in the anime are silent and punctuated by shrill, unforgettable sound design. Keep an eye (and ear) out every time you notice a train.

The anime is notably slower-paced than the manga (which can cause quite a whiplash when reading the rest after you complete the anime, especially because the ending few chapters are really rushed. I'll get to that). This works wonders in the first two episodes, where it languishes in the beautiful atmospheres it concocts, lives in the moments it creates and eases the viewer into the series better than the manga does. But in the middle of the series this serves to artificially slow down a manga that has found a more balanced and effective rhythm and makes it drag more than it should, though this is by no means a colossal flaw.

The anime was only adapted for one cour and past where the anime ends the manga hurtles at a breakneck pace for nearly twenty chapters, never stopping or taking the resolution of a story arc as an excuse to slow down and smell the roses, expanding upon the lovingly rendered but largely ignored cast of side characters. I think that's a big mistake. And the way that arc was resolved seemed odd in how little tension there was in its conclusion. It seems to me that 1) Nio Nakatani chose too simple an ending because they wanted to see characters they loved end in a completely tied up, happy manner in disregard of an accurate simulation of what would have happened in a situation like that if treated on its own terms, or 2) Nio Nakatani was rushing to conclude the series rapidly in a short number of chapters for some reason. What we got was great but truncated, riddled with large gaps unnaturally unfilled. It also means it's reasonably unlikely we're going to get a Bloom into You season 2 as there's not enough chapters to fit a cour- though a season 2 would certainly work given some well-written and placed filler. Adapting some of the short stories in the Bloom into You Comic Anthology would be a great start for that (12 other mangaka drew a chapter of manga each as a fanfiction about parts of the Bloom cast. It's inconsistent but beautiful, the cheesecake chapter especially is brilliant. It's worth a read once you're finished with the series).

Bloom into You is a gorgeous yuri romance demonstrating a masterful talent in building and breaking down multifaceted, layered and human characters, a series I learned a lot about myself from reading, and a series that I'll cherish for years to come.