Like most musical anime, this anime slaps with its incredible music. Maybe it's because I'm more fond of the rock genre than any other genre, but the electric guitar and drum play is a real treat. Combined with decent 3D animation to enhance their impact, it makes the music sections really fun to watch when they arrive. Most of its scenes that show the main cast playing and trying to overcome their shortcomings are cool to watch, all together, the music scenes are long but never feel like they overstayed their welcome, and it's able to deliver the climax really well with all the emotions swelling into one last epic guitar SOLO! Another applause to give is how well done the voice acting for the main cast, particularly Lilisa. She breathes a lot of life into Lilisa that you almost want to root for her. And to top it off, you have Band-Maid performing a good opening song for this anime, so some good things are going into this anime. Unfortunately, this is where the complement ends.
This anime suffers from a lot of downtime. Obviously, you can't just constantly show your main characters playing rock all the time without any story progression, but character progression in this anime is too basic and amateur compared to the already good music production. The anime really likes to rely heavily on tropes to move forward, without considering the chemistry between secondary characters beyond the main cast. So, any good minor characters are simply thrown out the window. Not to mention how repetitive the gags for the comedy sections can be. For example, if you look at Lilisa, her scenes mostly consist of trying to hide the fact that she's playing rock again, but the minor characters that are used for the gag are so poorly emphasised that they practically do nothing to progress the story or add anything to the story's context. It's always the same schtick; therefore, whenever it decides to escalate the story, it usually starts to introduce characters that have some form of relation or similarity to Lilisa, just so it can forcefully invoke the same kind of emotion Lilisa would feel after the end of their conversation. Meets a snobby artist? Show Lilisa being absolutely pissed. Gets insulted for her playing? She gets pissed and tries to outplay herself again. It's practically the same thing, and the story tries to act like Lilisa is growing as a character when she's been doing it since the first episode.
The only character I had some fondness of is Isemi, since her quirk and cute side, along with her little character arc in the anime, makes her the most polished out of the main cast. Going back to Lilisa, I initially liked her at first, but when the anime started to replay the same gags, she got really dull and boring to root for other than her rare crashouts against Otoha, her partner-in-crime, who's also even duller than Lilisa. Otoha is a perfect example of how NOT to write a deuteragonist for a story, she has to be one of the most boring deuteragonists an anime has to offer, there's almost no redeeming qualities about this character other than the fact that she crashes out after delivering the performance of a lifetime, which is fairly good because I like edgy bursts, but it feels like a last minute insert into a poorly done character that only exists to make the main character play again. Watching Otoha is like having a minor character being forced into the role of a deuteragonist without any qualities of what a deuteragonist should have. Yes, sure, she is a constant companion and also as important as Lilisa in most case scenarios, but her dialogues and mannerisms do not suffice as a proper deuteragonist. The chemistry between these partners is extremely stale; you could skip the scenes between them and the anime would run just as fine. The latest character to join the band would be Shiraya, another character that I think is only made for the sake of progressing the story. Nothing about this anime feels real, it's like some copycat that wanted to do rock anime because it saw the success of other anime doing it without recognizing why.
Speaking of character arcs, it does a somewhat okay job at growing the characters, although I find it to be very little in the main cast, despite Isemi (she gets off, because I like her). The character progression is not horrendous by any means, despite how I word this, but for a music anime about teens showing their angst and having frustrations, it's not worth the buildup to watch a character struggle for so little growth. Not to mention that Otoha has received NULL growth because she's seen as the PERFECT drum player who goes mad for every EPIC climaxes she gets. What I don't like is how they set up Otoha being just another school student who just loves to play drum, and then spend the entire season not receiving any growth! And since she's already perfect anyway, you get no insight regarding Otoha, because the series is more interested in showing Otoha just being a maniacal drumroller, and Lilisa going insane with the secrets she has to keep!
Like Lilisa ironically, it's like watching an anime doing an amateur job at writing characters despite having the talents and proficiency of other aspects, like its music, style, and production. Not only are the characters just too basic for this anime, but the characters' arcs are done in such an amateurish manner, it makes me want to scream, "YOU CAN'T EVEN WRITE CHARACTERS PROPERLY!!!!". This anime is an example of how not to exploit tropes to write characters. To summarise, Rock is a Lady's Modesty has irredeemable qualities, such as a boring deuteragonist, abysmal character growth, but it also has its own merits too, great music, good production, and emotionally powerful scenes. Take the good with the bad.
Thank you for reading.
