How I Attended an All-Guy's Mixer is not a complex show. The story's premise of its ostensibly straight male leads winding up dating a trio of hot drag kings certainly lends itself to the potential of exploring gender presentation, roles, and sexuality in relationships. But while those stories exist out in the world, this is not the anime interested in telling them. All Guy's Mixer is content to keep things simple as a generally light rom-com sauced up with the expected smattering of fanservice—it's just that in this case, said fanservice takes the specific form of hot girls dressed up as hot guys.

Credit where it's due, this does dispel some of the more potentially unsavory elements of All-Guy's Mixer's approach pretty quickly. Especially at the outset, in the first episode, I can see why some viewers might get the idea that the comedy of this series is wholly predicated on the punchline of the group of guy-friends stumbling into the straightest permutation of gay panic possible. Roll laugh track, rinse, repeat.

However, it should quickly become apparent even to those who didn't pick this anime up for its extremely specific charms that All-Guy's Mixer is being anything but subversive about the appeal of this cross-dressing crew. Tokiwa and his bros are getting flustered because Suo and the kings are so good-looking in their masc-presenting forms. The show does often mine reaction shots from what looks for all the world like the male cast members getting into compromising positions with other guys, but if you know why you're here, you know that style is all part of the appeal. All Guy's Mixer is here to preach the good word of butch girls in suits, and most of the cast pretty quickly get on board with this universal truth. Mostly. More on that in a minute.

What follows is a surprisingly tame, if often generally funny rom-com. All-Guy's Mixer is content to advance its relationships extremely incrementally. None of the main pairs are really couples by the end of the series, even as you might swear they must be, and crushes are confirmable by degrees all around. But that tameness also, as mentioned, extends to any of the more complex topics underscored by the story's subject matter. There's no interrogation of potential genderqueerness inherent in the act of cross-dressing. And for all the will-they-won't-they not-dating behind the character interactions, the story ruminates shockingly little on gender roles in relationships.

In some respects, this can be a relief—it's nice to see an anime like this do a plot about a character getting sick and needing to be taken care of and not slip in any commentary about who should or shouldn't be cared for because they're "the girl" in the relationship. None of the girls, at this stage, declare any hang-ups about wanting to be seen "as girls" by their prospective partners, remaining quite confident and casual in their boymode presentations. This, as I said, is the whole of the understood appeal of the series, after all. To be fair, it's not like All-Guy's Mixer dodges these topics entirely. There are brief implications that Suo might be interested in menswear beyond work reasons. And the ballad of Hagi and Kohaku begins and ends with the former interrogating his feelings on gendered attraction.

Hagi's first brush with being attracted to Kohaku's drag persona is to assume he's bisexual—something I shouldn't be surprised by but still am to see directly referenced by name in an anime like this. Of course, it soon becomes apparent that Hagi may just be Kohaku-sexual. Which, look, I get it. Kohaku's a tanned blonde drag king putting on a rough affect. Some of us are only human, okay? But this ends up dragging out the main arc of the pair's relationship, as Hagi grapples with his attraction to masc-Kohaku and what he feels should be a compulsory heterosexual preference for her feminine look. It can get frustrating, especially since, as mentioned, neither the writing nor Kohaku herself make any distinction between her masc and femme selves. It's more appreciable if you're able to empathize with Hagi's extremely early 20s brand of relationship idiocy (and Kohaku ain't exactly the duke of emotional intelligence herself); we've all got to start somewhere. But it is only a little sad that it takes Hagi the entire season to figure out what all the other characters do pretty much immediately. Alongside all that, many of the actual ups and downs of the pair's courtship are based on the most bog-standard of rom-com misunderstandings, to the point that the story calls it out.

With Hagi and Kohaku supplying the most complete romantic arc in the anime (they actually hold hands for a second by the end—steamy!) the other pairs of dudes and drag kings more incidentally fill out the show. That might not seem to bode well for alleged main pair Suo and Tokiwa, but in practice they get by well. Much of that is on Suo's suit-jacketed shoulders, to be sure. Suo is a rom-com character operating on another level than her contemporaries. She's the one who recognizes most of Hagi and Kohaku's aforementioned misunderstandings, trying to head them off or fix them when she can. She makes apparent early on that she's very assured in her attraction to Tokiwa and has resolved to pursue him in her particular, slow-and-steady way.

Honestly the biggest issue there is that, for all the time All-Guy's Mixer does give to directly following the girls in the story, the audience still isn't given quite enough interiority into Suo to grasp what her calculated approach with Tokiwa is. Yes, that drives up her mysterious allure, part of her appeal. But it also has the knock-on effect of obscuring what she finds appealing about Tokiwa himself who is, not to put too fine a point on it, an entirely generic rom-com lead. He lacks even the more annoying foibles of Hagi, somewhat sapping Suo's character as it's not communicated what attracted her to this absolute asset flip of a man. Tokiwa is fine as a central viewpoint character. But all the other personalities in this otherwise pretty soft show outshine him; there's no way he's going to be anyone's favorite.

The remaining couple thus fill out the more outsized outings for All Guy's Mixer and the most comedic parts of this romantic comedy. Asagi gets points early, anyway, being the one dude in the trio who has no problem rolling with the whole cross-dressing thing. Of course, part of his ease with getting along with the girls, and particularly his assigned partner Fuji, is that I'm not entirely certain he even knows what sex is. The main joke between Asagi and Fuji is that she draws hardcore BL doujin, and even conscripts him into helping with parts of them, but doesn't want to reveal the nature of her creations for fear of shattering his college-age innocence. Some of these bits get pretty funny, especially as Asagi is so gosh-darned good-natured that it's easy to see why Fuji would like this human cocker spaniel. Fuji and Asagi grow to have probably the closest thing to an actual dating "relationship" by the end of the season, and the appreciability of that really speaks to the perfectly cromulent baseline of All-Guy's Mixer's narrative and romantic ambitions.

Presentation for the anime is about on that same level. This was not a story that demanded a sakuga spectacle, but it would have been nice were there a little more shine on it. The androgynous attractiveness of the drag kings is the main selling point, and they look…mostly good, most of the time. I think their base character designs are doing a lot of the heavy lifting—and those weights still get dropped as the art often slips into simple chibi style. There are some standout sparkly shots of Suo, but Ashi Production's efforts are mostly in "gets the job done" territory. The voice acting helps a bit more. Mikako Komatsu absolutely understands the princely assignment as Suo, and it's fun to hear Aoi Yūki doing a deadpan for Fuji. The standout is probably Nao Tōyama as Kohaku, who gets the more complex character range to work with the wider gulf between the character's everyday and at-work personas. She plays well off Gakuto Kajiwara and his constant (and only occasionally amusing) wailing as Hagi.

How I Attended an All-Guy's Mixer isn't bad, but it hardly feels like it's taking advantage of any of its potential. Whether that's the chance for more salient commentary on gender roles or simply depicting its drag kings with a saucier sheen, there was the chance for a transcendently unique rom-com here. This isn't that show, and what's here is nice in a cooler, more chuckle-worthy way. And it should all go without saying that the appeal is uppedexponentially if you're here for the particular fanservice it's providing. That's what kept me going, naturally. Things might've been dragging a little as a festival date or beach trip was set up, then Suo or Kohaku would appear, rizzing it up in well-pressed professional attire, and I'd have to fan myself and be reminded that, sometimes, even the most middling anime can achieve moments of greatness.