I remember being a kid and reading the manga because the art looked interesting. Each chapter was only a couple pages. But it was chapter after chapter of this dude being a tool and a doormat for some popular girl who just pretends he doesn’t exist in public and I stopped because I figured it was just gonna be pathetic the whole time.
Have some god damn self respect.
Maybe it’s a hot take but as a grown ass adult I have little interest in romance stories about high schoolers.
That's a very cold take, the real hot take is that many people misidentify the reason they dislike high school romance anime as being "because they [the dislikers] are adults" — i.e. that they're too old to relate to the characters — rather than because of any number of legitimate grievances with the genre as it stands, that they've just noticed more with time or age, probably mixed with some performative adulthood age-related brainworms or whatever.
Like, if the problem is just the ability to relate to the characters, then it would follow that people would complain more about romance stories with characters considerably more alien than high schoolers to their own lives, yet it is only ever high school romance anime that people seem to complain about. And if the problem is the ability to relate to the characters, then even for the teenagers watching HS romance anime, if they aren't from Japan then they're still watching a romance show set in a radically different corner of the world, with a different culture valuing different things and with different norms for communication — sometimes the shows are even set in a different time period or have fantastical elements et cetera. Is all of that, everything about the setting and characters aside from the characters' ages, just supposed to be a complete non-factor for relatability?