Yumemiru Danshi wa Genjitsushugisha

They don’t want you till they can’t have you. Seeing them skip the entire he loves the girl and pesters her with love in the first scene really helped get through this show and i messed around and sped through it in 24 hours after getting disappointed with another weekly anime i was watching.

The show checks all the boxes npc mc who fawns over the girl check, tsundere female lead check, shy quiet book girl check, out of nowhere competition for the female lead check, bully older sister check, hot student counsel check. Not reinventing the wheel at all.

Great how once you stop chasing that ... moby dick you see there are other fish in the sea. Literally as soon as he stop the stalking fmc the girls flock to him and all he is doing is being a sensible person. His friends sister was a thirst trap, the student counsel (moral and discipline really but same s##t) was just plain, and the book girl got a hard skip, but we knew it was all for the sake of becoming better for the fmc tsundere.

Honestly stick to your guns of staying away from her till she asks you out king. Great example of being toxic hard to get but in the male side. City boys winning lol

This is a weird one. I give it 8/10 but I have to categorise it as mixed feelings, since I love it, but it is flawed.
Where to begin? I love the story. He pushes and pushes and she blocks and parries his advances. Then "because... reasons..." He stops and pulls back. He stops calling her by her first name, which all throws her for a loop. However because of his ceasefire, she has time to contemplate the MC shaped hole in her life and even identifies how his harassment helped change her for the better. She concludes that she misses him and starts her own ... faltering pursuit of him. In a world where most ideas get recycled to death, I've not come across another one like this. Yes there are other break-up and get back together stories, but this one has that unique angle of not breaking up, because they were never together.

I really like the entire female cast of the English dub, but Gabriel Regojo, who voices our MC often irks me with his over annunciation of small grunts and groans. Is it his choices, or is it the script? I don't know, but the overall effect is that he sounds like he has Tourette's minus the swearing. I like his actual voice and he otherwise gives a very rich and interesting performance. Also, the dub often rewrites the story. The plot of him stopping using her first name is gone completely, he just calls her Aika throughout the whole show. Other times phrases are changed, which deflects the narrative away from the original. So watching both subs and the dub will result in different experiences. I find myself cherry picking from both and creating a unique story of my own.

I don't like the execution of the story. At the beginning he stops pursuing her. He starts attracting other women and she starts getting jealous and wants him back at the end, but the 12 episodes this story is spread across is filled with some weird and random plots. While I would not call it a harem, he does, for one reason or another start to draw in other girls, but these relationships are never filled out or explored to any real depth. With many of them, the idea of them actually being interested in him romantically is all very ambiguous. There is also a disparity between the age of the characters and some of their dialogue. With Sajou psychoanalysing some situations like a professional psychologist and certainly not a 17 year old young man. I know this is a common issue with many stories be they WN, LN, manga or anime. Many writers fail to make their dialogue age related, so nothing new here.

As I said at the start, in the absence of any other show doing this story but better, I often rewatch this flawed work and I really enjoy it.

The Dreaming Boy is a Realist had potential to explore the realization, reflection & improvement of a person who was consumed by infatuation and unrequited love to the point of obsessive & self-destructive stalker behaviour, as the initial episodes showcased & the title of the series implies. Instead it’s a series about how you can be rewarded for the aforementioned behaviour rather than the improvements and how after separating oneself from the situation (in this case no longer engaging with the love interest), realizing your faults and growing as a person, the target of the unrequited love who blatantly states NUMEROUS TIMES that they don't ... share your feelings, will begin to care, reciprocate and engage.

'Stalk a girl until she says leave me alone & when you do just that, she'll fall for you'.

The Main character & love interest rarely interact across the 12 episodes and when they do it is frustrating & belittling to any realizations or improvements the protagonist had made. As a result the finale felt unearned, off-putting & sent a message that was opposite to that of the show’s title, main character & initial episodes.

Beyond the poor message, The Dreaming Boy is a Realist has sporadic pacing, poor focus (side characters received more focus than the main characters through multi episode arcs), lacking character designs & out of the blue character introductions.