Insomniacs After School: 8 Best Characters

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly about Insomniacs After School makes it such a compelling show. It evokes a feeling of longing in the viewer. A feeling of pursuing your dreams and wanting something more. It does so by doing a deep dive into a niche hobby that most people wouldn’t be that interested in.

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The pull of slice-of-life anime has always been the characters and their interactions. From the romance subplots to the bonds of friendship, characters are the lifeblood of a good slice-of-life show, and Insomniacs After School is no exception.

8 Motoko Kanikawa: Tsundere

Who doesn’t love a good tsundere that doesn’t go around hitting the main character like she’s trying to get a restraining order? Don’t answer that; it’s a rhetorical question because the answer is, obviously, nobody! Tsunderes have been a trope in anime that has started to become quite overplayed, but some shows just do it right.

Motoko Kanikawa, a friend of one of the main characters, has just the right amount of abuse-to-cuteness ratio for her to work as a character. That’s to say: she’s not that cute, but she’s not that abusive either! She’s in a nice soft spot between liking the main character and having an abrasive personality but being a realistic enough representation that she doesn’t go around giving him head bonks every two minutes. Or at all, really.

7 Kanami Anamizu: Sportsy Tough-girl

A tomboy at heart, Kanami Anamizu takes the sports girl trope and flips it on its head. Yes, she’s big, yes, she’s tough, and yes, she’s into baseball. But she also sucks at baseball and desperately wants to get better at it to make the regular lineup for the school team.

Her struggle with sports aside, she makes a great foil for Motoko’s feisty personality. She’s the unmovable object to her tornado, bringing a degree of stability to the group and balancing out the dynamic quite well. Though she might seem unapproachable from afar, she’s a sweetheart once you get to know her.

6 Yui Shiromaru: Helpful Alumni

One of the more important characters in the series, Yui, is the person who helps break the main characters into the ultra-niche hobby of being an astronomer/photographer. It’s one thing to go into the deep end of photography and come out having learned words you’ll never use in day-to-day conversation and yet another thing entirely to do that whole process in the dead of night.

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Yui’s personality is that of a shy maiden. She’s a bit tomboyish but not overly so. As a strong independent woman, she lives alone with her pet cat and loves to pursue her hobby, but she seems to be terribly entrenched in conservative Japanese values, and so do most of the others in the anime.

5 Tao Ukegawa: Class President

An empathetic and understanding person, and a great friend besides, Tao is a member of the student council. He’s one of the main character’s few friends, and he makes it count. He’s the kind of guy you could go do with a dead body, and his first question would be, “Do you have the shovel, or should I get one?” Not to glorify murder, but sometimes you’ve got to hide a body.

4 Mina Nono: Friendly Artist

One of Magari’s good friends, Mina, is the resident creatively inclined individual with a flair for homeliness. Yes, that’s a word, and you can’t convince me otherwise. She’s the mother of the group, bringing them food and watching over them with a keen eye, providing help as needed.

Of course, she’s still a teenager, but her skill with a pen and paper would have you believe otherwise at times. She uses Magari and Nakami as models for her club project and ends up using that to help the two design the flier for their star gazing party.

3 Usako Kurashiki: Cool Teacher

Perhaps the only reason the plot went as far as it did, Usako Kurashiki seems to be the only adult who doesn’t think bedtime is a curfew anyone below 18 needs to uphold. She brings a breath of fresh air to the stuffy conservative space of the traditional Japanese high school and helps out the two insomniac-ridden students in whatever way she can, other than lending them her fan.

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Despite seemingly not caring, the school nurse is a great teacher who’s surprisingly invested in the activities of the astronomy club. She helps them organize different events, hooks them up with alumni, suggest different activities, and even goes so far as to treat everyone after a couple of days of hard work and nothing to show for it as a way to cheer them up.

2 Ganta Nakami: Main Character

It’s hard to overstate how much screen presence Ganta has. He is the star of the show. Well, one of the stars, at least. His introspective musings, the melancholic music, and the oppressive atmosphere of the morning all come together to paint a picture that makes even the most chipper morning person empathize with his problems.

Though he can be a bit self-absorbed at times, thinking of himself as the only one with issues (as pointed out by the resident tsundere), he is a genuinely good person, though broken in a lot of ways. His character is the result of an oppressive and uncaring society imposing its values on him, expecting him to conform to their norms with no regard for his personal needs and wants.

1 Isaki Magari: Adorable Love Interest

It’s hard to capture the magic of Isaki Magari, but the anime does a fantastic job. She has a wonderful energy about her that lights up whatever room she’s in. Her aura draws in Ganta like a fire draws in moths, but she doesn’t burn. Instead, she gives him warmth, and he reciprocates, both of them leaning on each other in a way they can’t on their other friends.

The budding romance between Magari and Nakami is one of the cutest and most wholesome things you’ll see in a while. The innocent attraction to one another, the reliance on each other’s presence, and the simple joy they find in each other’s embrace; everything about their relationship is so pure that we don’t deserve it.

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