The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You

Episodes 1-3

One of the main reasons I love harem anime, and RomComs in general, is how the best of them can use a basic wish-fulfillment setup to explore different types or forms of love. Romance is a broad, nebulous idea that means different things to different people, and digging into the hows and whys of what attracts people to one another is how the more ambitious and thoughtful entries in the subgenre distinguish themselves. Ironically, a lot of the discourse around these series tends toward the reductive; zeroing in on the idea of who “wins” at the end of the story, and determining the quality of everything else based on whether they think the right candidate was chosen. Alternatively, you often get calls for a true harem ending, not because the fans want to see a polyamorous relationship explored, but because that means having to avoid any hard decisions or unhappiness for any given character. After all, the argument goes, how could these characters be happy if they don't end up with the person they're in love with at this exact moment?

You might think, what with its 100-timing premise, that The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You would fall into that camp. Its very core idea is a divine contrivance to guarantee 100 women will all fall in love with our main character. What could be more of a half-assed excuse for wish fulfillment than that? Yet across these three episodes, 100 GFs has already demonstrated that it not only has grander ambitions with its polycule but that it never half-asses anything. It puts its whole, entire ass into every character, every plot point, and every joke with unerring enthusiasm, and that's made it a vastly charming series already.

Episode one is by far the most perfunctory, sprinting through the setup as efficiently as it can, while still establishing its distinct sense of humor to keep things moving. It's plenty funny and bolstered by the anime team being on the same wavelength as the material, altering or adding to jokes from the manga in their clever ways. It's a solid introduction that will probably give you a good idea of whether you'll like the series, but it's not until episode two that the show cuts loose with its genre-savvy comedy.

Take the way it tackles the topic of the First Kiss. There are few things more sacrosanct in RomCom anime than a person's first kiss, yet anyone with a modicum of romantic experience probably remembers their first kiss as a fumbling, awkward experience rather than a life-changing romantic milestone. If one wanted simply to parody romance anime, you could lean into that by contrasting the characters' imagined version of their first kiss, with the mundane reality, and realize that your “first” isn't all that important compared to all the ones after it. 100 Gfs chooses to go in the exact opposite direction, completely buying into the holy experience of sucking face to the point where our characters concoct increasingly unhinged plans to decide Rentaro's inaugural smooch, culminating in a complex double-blind approach to craft Schrodinger's First Kiss, a move that is simultaneously brilliant and stone-cold stupid all at once. Rather than merely mocking the fantasies presented in its genre, it drives those ideas to their illogical limits to make something funnier that's still paradoxically sincere.

It's a deceptively clever kind of comedy that's executed to perfection here. Every member of the cast gives it their all, throwing themselves into each joke and contorting their vocal cords to sell any punchline. Even jokes that should honestly fall flat, like the bizarre French-kissing vice principal in episode two, wind up working through sheer power of execution, pushing into total absurdity to the point where even things in bad taste wind up getting a laugh. I should not be laughing at jokes about a tsundere beating up the main character for (perceived) sexual harassment in 2023, yet somewhere between the whole thing being initiated by a cat and Karane only being upset because she wants some tender foreplay before getting busy on the school roof, it orbits back around to being funny.

Yet even as it's being funny, there's the undercurrent of Rentaro and his (at the time) two girlfriends navigating their new relationship, finding where each person's boundaries lie and trying to strike a balance that keeps the girls from feeling like they need to “compete” for affection. I would never try to portray this show as a realistic representation of polyamory, but if nothing else it clearly understands that communication and emotional honesty are key to making any relationship work.

Building off that element, episode three shifts gears into something surprisingly sentimental. Sure, Shizuka's particular form of Glossophobia is kind of comical, since she communicates entirely through her favorite fantasy novel, turning all of her dialogue into fancy and antiquated quotes. Yet the patient and understanding way Rentaro gets to know her is heartening. The ultimate resolution – with him painstakingly transcribing her novel into an e-book so she can use text-to-speech, is honest-to-god romantic; a gesture that accepts Shizuka for who she is rather than trying to change her while giving her the tools to make connections for herself. It's an affirmation that she doesn't need somebody to “fix” her to be worthy of love, and it's somehow coming from the show where our main character nearly died trying to kiss a girl the episode prior.

That's just the kind of magic that makes this whole series work. 100 Girlfriends is silly, absurd, and tongue-in-cheek, yet it's capable of total sincerity, and might even have something worthwhile to say about love. Like Rentaro, the show has a long, love-lorn road ahead of it, but these opening episodes give every reason to think it'll succeed.

Footnote: In the spirit of Rentaro I have provided alternate review images to maintain equal representation among all currently presented girlfriends.

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The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.