The Winter 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Medaka Kuroiwa Is Impervious to My Charms

Mona is the cutest girl in school, and she knows it. In fact, she's worked hard to make her high school debut successful. But no matter what she does, she can't seem to catch the eye of stone-cold stoic Medaka Kuroiwa—but she's not about to give up that easy. Medaka, on the other hand, has been raised at a temple and was told to never become close to women.

Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is based on the manga series by Ran Kuze. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

As a shy and introverted person, Mona Kawai is the kind of person I dread meeting. She's popular, secure in the knowledge that she'll always be popular, and has zero respect for anyone's boundaries. To be fair, she's never needed to cultivate that last skill because of the previous two items in the list: Mona has been universally admired and adored from pretty much day one of her life. It makes sense that it would stick in her craw the first time she met someone who didn't throw himself at her feet. I don't like how she harasses the eponymous Medaka Kuroiwa to get him to fall in line.

While we get an answer as to why he's not fawning all over her at the end of the episode, the greater issue is that Mona never even considers that he might have a reason for not being into her. He could be queer – gay, ace, or something else that would make him impervious to her. He could be shy and, therefore, uncomfortable with her aggressive tactics. He could be religious and avoid contact for spiritual reasons. There's a whole list of things that Mona never thinks about because her ego drives her. But again, nothing in her entire seventeen years has prepared her for not being the center of everyone's world and attention.

Am I making way too much of what's unquestionably a romantic comedy? Absolutely. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is no more paper-thin than any other title in the genre, and it desperately wants to be funny in its first episode. The visuals do a nice job with Mona's peek-a-boo sexuality, going between teasing and her increasingly desperate attempts to get Medaka's attention, even happily showing her lack of self-awareness when she's happy to rip her shirt open to show him her boobs, but embarrassed when her white T-shirt is drenched, and he sees them that way. If I were inclined to gross over-analysis, I'd even say that Mona is a sad character, so used to being loved for her looks that she can't imagine anyone liking her for any other reason.

But at the end of the day, this first episode is about a girl harassing a boy who wants to be left alone. I don't love that, or even like it, so this is it for me.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it; I was done with this anime by its commercial break. It had overstayed its welcome, and I would have shut it off if it hadn't been my job to continue. It's not that the show looks bad or the story is incomprehensible. Rather, it's the simple fact that the episode is a single joke told repeatedly. Mona tries to make Madaka outwardly swoon; he does not. Sometimes, she goes too far; to counteract this, he does something that causes her to swoon instead. Repeat for 22 minutes. And while there are variations in the core joke, it nonetheless always plays out exactly as you would predict.

Moreover, it's obvious right away that he thinks she's just as cute as everyone else. He hides it—and the reason is explained in the back half of the episode. Bored and disengaged as I was during the episode's second half, I couldn't help but think how much better the show would be if he did dislike her overly cute nature.

This would allow for a much more complex relationship to form. Imagine if they somehow made a personal connection despite their mutual dislike for each other and came together slowly and surely despite it. Instead, we get a “simple misunderstanding comedy.” She is put off by the fact that he's the only person who doesn't treat her as the queen bee she believes herself to be, and he is simply trying to stay stone-faced due to the religious expectations placed upon him.

Overall, it's a one-note anime. If that note sounds pleasing to your ears, you'll probably enjoy it, but if not, it turns into a piercing squeak really quickly.

Raise your hand if you immediately divined why Medaka Kuroiwa was avoiding the protagonist Mona, or at least could guess that he was wildly horny for her. Please note that I'm not saying this in a braggy, smug way; I expect there will be quite a few hands up because two things about Medaka are blindingly obvious: a) that he is wildly horny for Mona, and b) he has to suppress that for some reason. By the time we reached the end of the episode and it was revealed that he was a man of the cloth, I didn't even feel proud of myself for guessing. I was bored after sitting through 20 minutes of the same joke, waiting for the reveal.

The joke: Mona is proud of how cute she is, but Medaka is the only person she's ever met that she doesn't have wrapped around her little finger. She throws herself at him, usually in ways that involve exposing herself, only for him to rebuff her. She is upset and confused. Repeat ad infinitum.

This is one of a recent spate of anime rom-coms built on a single gag, where we're supposed to be charmed by how wholesome the characters are. She acts sexually to him but is embarrassed! He acts unfriendly but is in love with her! They're both just so shy! I'm not saying these series never work, because Kaguya-sama: Love is War exists, and there are several lesser-but-still-good rom-coms with that same structure, but without excellent character writing and comic timing, these things tend to be duller and repetitive than charming. Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms falls into the dull and repetitive category.

It also has an oily sheen of misogyny laid over the top. Mona has spent her whole life with the world falling at her feet, giving her an enormous head. She's the perspective character, but considering how blatantly aimed at a male audience this story is, she's not there for the audience to sympathize with. Rather, it felt like this uppity pretty girl, so full of herself, who normally wouldn't give a boring guy like Medaka the time of day, is getting her comeuppance. It would be hard to deny that there's an element of sadistic glee at watching a girl like Mona humiliate herself to get the attention of the one guy who doesn't do whatever she wants. You know, incel fantasy.

Anyone who has ever heard me rave about Kaguya-sama: Love is War and Teasing Master Takagi-san can tell you that the romantic-comedy trope that I am the easiest mark for is when the two leads are both really obviously and hopelessly into each other, but their relationship is consistently foiled by the fact that either one or both of them are complete goddamned idiots. In the case of Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms, the idiot in question is undoubtedly our heroine, Mona Kawai, who is so used to being able to charm the pants off of any human alive that her brain gets completely broken by the fact that there is just one dude, the titular Medaka, who seemingly refuses to fall in love with her at first sight. Her attempts to woo Medaka start innocently enough—a bit of small talk here, some corny cat jokes there - but she very quickly becomes desperate enough to mine every last trick in the Big Book of Rom-Com Clichés, including the raunchy and depraved ones reserved for only the most shameless of sex romps. This is how Mona ends up flashing her panties to every student in the school and how she later resorts to straight-up busting her boobs out of her shirt and into Medaka's face after she lures him to the school infirmary.

Now, all of these shenanigans could easily come across as deeply annoying - borderline sociopathic, even - if all they amounted to was watching this poor kid from the sticks move to Tokyo and then suddenly become the victim of deranged amounts of sexual harassment. What ends up saving Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms from its own intentionally overbearing shtick is the fact that Medka is demonstrably very much into picking up what Mona is putting down (which is, often enough, literally just her boobs and ass). The problem is that the code of that darned temple he was born into demands a life of uncompromising chastity and self-control. How much Medaka himself is actually interested in staying committed to this lifestyle is pretty suspect, which also helps us take the comedy of his insane new life at face value and laugh along at all of the funny jokes and ridiculous scenarios.

Granted, Mona is too stupid to live and too popular to die, and her insufferably clueless worldview is heightened to the absolute limits of tolerance by design. Naturally, this will mean that a lot of folks will understandably refuse to stand more than a minute in this queen bee's company, which will make it pretty difficult to, you know, continue watching the show. I totally get that. I may have damned this title with faint praise when I compared it to some of the best anime rom-coms of the last twenty years up at the top of this preview. To be clear, Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is absolutely not a standard-bearing masterpiece of its genre or anything. The show is pretty danged funny and charming if you can get on its wavelength, though.