I binged the first season of this over the weekend and I felt so normal and fine about it that I did something I've never done before: I sought out the light novel.

And it's good. It's the same story I liked so much in the anime. But there's definitely a lot of elevation happening in the series that sadly isn't here in the book. I don't know if that's due to the nature of light novels themselves, or maybe a quirk of the translation, or maybe even the fact that animation is an inherently collectivist medium, but it just doesn't quite have the same sparkle as the show.

I'm still gonna read the rest of it though don't get me wrong