The way twins are represented in the media is frustrating. They're treated as creepy at worst, a single unit at best, and more often than not, a gimmicky curiosity. Although the “evil twin” trope has largely been relegated to the past as a hackneyed asspull, storylines about them are usually about their search for individual identity. Stories that represent the full complexity of twins' relationships with each other and the rest of the world are borderline nonexistent. I know, because I am a same-sex fraternal twin, just like Rumi and Naori.

It was this that led me to dismiss Love Is Indivisible by Twins out of hand. A story about fraternal twins where they're both in love with the same guy? Sounds completely implausible. I've never known a pair of twins with similar taste in romantic partners, my sister and I included. To me, the premise spoke of romcom shenanigans and a fundamental misunderstanding of how twins' relationships outside the two of them function. It was reminiscent of how twins tend to be fetishized as sexy duplicates.

But I'm willing to admit when my assumptions are wrong, and I must give the show credit: it nails the complexities of Rumi and Naori's relationship down. They've moved well past the stage of forging their own identities, with their own interests and friends. Rumi is the “normie” of the two, athletic and honest. As the older of the two, more capable of blending in, she's taken on the “onee-san” role, wanting to protect Naori from the world. Naori, on the other hand, is a huge nerd. Not just an anime otaku, she's dropping constant references to classic science fiction and fantasy that she shares with Jun and her dad. She's also backhanded and manipulative, taking pride in her intelligence to the point that it alienates her from others. While the two are different, they share some similarities; and while they have their own lives, their relationship to one another informs how they interact with the rest of the world. They're not close, and their conversations tend to be fractious, but they understand one another in a way that nobody else does. Not even Jun.

Unfortunately, Rumi and Naori's relationship was the only thing the show did right. When I think about the two of them vying for Jun's affections, allI can think is, “Him?” Jun repeatedly asserts that he can't possibly choose between the two girls, claiming that he loves them both and asking them to wait for him to make up his mind. The girls go along with this ridiculous proclamation in their own ways, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what makes him worth waiting for. He has more personality than your bland potato protagonist, but not nearly enough to make him worth going through all this trouble. Naori is especially aggressive, her pursuit of him bordering on sexual assault; were the genders reversed, these scenes would have been perceived very differently.

Romance series tend to live or die on the quality of the supporting cast; they are the figures who tend to drive subplots and create a sense of who the characters are outside of the focal relationships. They are essential for giving the main cast someone to bounce off of and a sense of a world existing outside of their maelstrom of teenage emotions. The supporting cast of Love Is Indivisible by Twins may as well not even be there for all the impact they have on the narrative. For the most part they're nonentities, there for Rumi, Naori, and Jun to bounce their thoughts and feelings off of when they can't confide in one another. The only exception is Shiena, the perky gyaru that Naori befriends despite herself. She injects life into every scene she's in, but even she doesn't add much to the narrative.

The script, adapted from the original novels by the venerable Michiko Yokote, seems to be going for a kind of verisimilitude outside of the unlikely central premise. The writing has a naturalistic feel; Naori and her friends especially capture how geeks tend to talk to one another, dropping names and references as a kind of in-group argot. As such, the dialogue shifts between engaging, dull, or excruciatingly obnoxious, depending on the episode or even scene; no character seemed to be immune from grating on my nerves at times. I suppose that's realistic for teenagers? However, the way the pace meandered through moments in their lives had a flattening effect. It meant no parallelism or narrative resonance between Naori and Rumi's lives meant to amplify emotional highs and lows; Rumi's disappointment at an injury forcing her out of a basketball tournament carriest the same weight as Shiena making dinner for Naori.

However, I cannot lay the blame for the flatness fully at Yokote's feet, as some decent direction and animation could have made it work. The studio credited with animation production, ROLL2, is primarily a support studio, responsible for assisting and 2nd key animation; Love Is Indivisible by Twins is the first series they did primary production work for and it shows. The show is a glowy mess, colored primarily in pastels but without the eye for color pairings required to make such a creative choice work. They seem to be going for “atmospheric” lighting choices such as the gold of the magic hour or soft haziness, but that translates to lots and lots of lens flare. Even when there is no light source anywhere near the camera. The light-colored, slightly fuzzy outlines make it hard for the eye to distinguish between objects with insufficiently contrasting shades of brown and pink, making it downright eye-smarting to look at in some scenes.

Anime is a visual medium; the images on-screen are just as important to telling the story as the words coming out of the characters' mouths. The way the people on-screen move and emote says what the dialogue cannot and, unfortunately, the best script in the world could not have saved the lack of visual storytelling panache on display here. The characters have a limited range of expressionality to their faces and body language in all but a few scenes, and while Maaya Uchida shines as usual as the capricious Naori, the voice cast largely does little to make up for the animation's lack of personality.

Without a doubt, Love Is Indivisible by Twins is one of the most realistic and relatable depiction of twin relationships I've ever encountered. However, it's mired up in an uninteresting plot and an unbelievable love triangle. I could get everything that it offers me by calling my sister, and then talking to my husband about how annoying my she is, while she talks to her husband about how annoying I am. (Don't worry, she won't read this – she hates anime!) Only in this version, the secondary characters are always engaging, we're not fighting over a boring schween who refuses to choose between us, and the animation and lighting are much better.