The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

How I Attended an All-Guy's Mixer

College student Tokiwa gets invited to a mixer by his female classmate Suo and is able to bring along two other friends as Suo will be accompanied by two of her coworkers. So he brings his friends Asagi and Hagi along to get acquainted with Suo and two other girls. But by the time they arrive at the meet-up spot, they're confused and flustered to be greeted by not three cute women but instead three women who are dressed as dazzlingly handsome men.

How I Attended an All-Guy's Mixer is based on the manga series by Nana Aokawa. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Fridays.

Recently, for a different Guide, I read the manga I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup, a variation on the same theme as this show. But where that story was almost immediately an introspective look at how gender presentation coexists (and runs up against) social ideas of gender, this one plays the cross-dressing for laughs. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, but it does result in an episode that's many iterations of the exact same joke for twenty-three minutes. The joke? That Suo, Tokiwa's college acquaintance, and her friends Fuji and Kohaku all work at a drag king bar and make particularly gorgeous men.

In the episode's defense, it does play this out mildly differently for each couple that's being set up. Asagi, the dippy member of the group, is largely unphased by the entire thing and quickly establishes a misunderstanding with Fuji. Fuji is a manga creator (I would have said novelist before the imagery in the ending theme) who, I suspect, creates risqué works for which she is constantly trawling for inspiration. She and Asagi interact on a level where he's got no clue, and she's enjoying that. They're the pairing I found the most entertaining.

On the other hand, Suo has a crush on Tokiwa and is angling to use their mixer to do something about it. She seems to have discovered that her cross-dressing can be used to keep him off-balance, with their budding relationship built on her teasing him. The final couple-to-be, Hagi and Kohaku, are the least defined at the moment, mostly bouncing off the other two couples instead of interacting with each other.

There's nothing I can point to here that is explicitly terrible. The guys are a bit thrown by the fact that the ladies are “better” guys than they are, but no aspersions are cast upon them. It's the sort of episode that makes me think it would have been better as a punchy short, and I'm left with the somewhat bizarre recommendation to skip this and read the totally unrelated I Cross-Dressed for the IRL Meetup instead.