Your Lie in April is available on Crunchyroll, Hulu, Netflix, or any shop that carries manga.
The kind of people who read media blogs are, on the whole, the kind of people who consume a lot of stories to begin with. And once you take in enough of them (probably by the time you’re in middle school, really), you start to see certain patterns that keep showing up. Like spotting cracks in an overloaded dam, you can tell where a character arc is going before it’s halfway through. Sometimes it only takes the first five minutes of them being on-screen.
These things tend to break down into patterns. A repeat role-playing-game player knows that a broken bridge typically suggest that there’s a nearby town with a sidequest to fix it. Likewise, once you see a certain kind of plot play out enough times, you notice the individual pieces that are used and re-used to build that plot. Only a doomed officer announces that he has three days left until retirement. In any “never found a body” scenario, the supposedly-deceased is 99.9% guaranteed to turn up alive later. It’s like foreshadowing, but in a way that’s become deliberately obvious to the audience.
And, to be honest, Your Lie in April feels deliberately obvious a lot of the time.
