“You Have No Enemies Here”

Bocchi The Rock, Music As Therapy, And Social Anxiety

Credit: Crunchyroll

This essay contains spoilers for season one of Bocchi the Rock!

Bocchi the Rock! was the sleeper anime hit of 2022. The story of an extreme introvert with social anxiety who wants to form a band, the show’s hilarious framing of Bocchi’s anxious episodes always manages to be funny without laughing at her. It’s an empathetic look at what social anxiety is like that pays just as much attention to Bocchi’s inner monologue as the minutiae of being a musician.

Bocchi (the show)’s strength is in how it deals with the main character’s social anxiety. She doesn’t miraculously overcome it all at once after a single pep talk; it drags at her through the whole series. She doesn’t want to stay the way she is, she wants to interact with people and have a full life without having a total meltdown at the mere mention of the school culture festival. So she works at it, and steadily improves over the course of season one’s 12-episode run.

Episode six, called “eight views,” has a great moment of personal growth for Bocchi during her street performance with Kikuri, the older bassist and more experienced musician (and alcoholic) who becomes a sort of mentor. Though she barely knows Bocchi, Kikuri can see she’s freaked out. Before they start to play she says, “You’re not in combat with the people in front of you. Don’t get it twisted who your enemies are.”

Bocchi doesn’t understand that right away, but still starts to play. When she finally overcomes her fear enough to open her eyes, expecting to see people jeering and booing her, she sees something else: a group of people captivated by her playing (eight people, to be exact. Hence the episode title, “Eight Views”).

“That’s right,” she thinks, “I don’t have any enemies here. The only people here are the ones who stopped to see me play.” It’s a small but pivotal moment. It’s also a great demonstration of a device used in cognitive behavioral therapy called cognitive reframing.

According to an article on it from Verywell Mind by Amy Morin, LCSW:

The essential idea behind reframing is that the frame through which a person views a situation determines their point of view. When that frame…