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This Week in Anime
Caught Up in this Season's Whirlwind of Romance Anime

by Lucas DeRuyter & Nicholas Dupree,

This week, Lucas and Nick sit down to talk about the surprisingly vast number of romance anime this season—and struggle to decide which are actually worth watching.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, My Wife Has No Emotion, Days With My Stepsister, Love Is Indivisible by Twins, Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!, Pseudo Harem, Twilight Out of Focus, The Magical Girl and The Evil Lieutenant Used to Be Archenemies, and Senpai is an Otokonoko are currently streaming on Crunchyroll. 2.5 Dimensional Seduction is available on HIDIVE.

@Lossthief @BeeDubsProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Lucas
Hey Nick, weird question; did we accidentally pick the worst season to dodge the isekai roundup!?? Chris and Steve seemed like they had a WAY better time with it than we did last season! I think WE should watch a bunch of shows in a given genre to make up for missing out on the year's best season for isekai!
Nick
I don't know, I think any column where somebody doesn't have to watch Failure Frame counts as dodging a bullet. Still, we do have an unusually large buffet of RomComs this season. So sure, let's all get aboard the Love Boat and watch some deeply suppressed Japanese high schoolers blush so hard their ears bleed!
Yeah, on the one hand, it really is an indicator that there's "Too Much Anime" when we can have multiple genre roundups in a given season. But on the other hand, I started my watch through with Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian and saw myself on screen within the first two minutes!
Somehow I doubt we're keeping this session at under two hours, but that's basically us at this very moment. Like staring into a mirror where my bangs suck.
Aw, come on Nick, you're much less of a same-face Gary Stu than the average anime RomCom protag!
Granted that's probably why I've never had a pretty foreign girl secretly crushing on me. It's how the universe keeps balance, I guess.

Sorry bro, I definitely do not know that feeling. The closest I've ever come was when a cute Quebecois girl taught me French-Canadian curses.
Okay, I took the exact same screenshot and it's WILD to me that so many of these anime outright state their entire premise to the audience in the first episode. Like, maybe trust the audience to figure out what's going on and trust that your own writing is making this situation clear?
We live in an anime industry where 20% of the shows tell you their plot in the title so I consider this masterful subtlety.
That being said, I actually think Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian is in the top half of RomComs from this season! The premise lends itself well to an exploration of dating people with different backgrounds and there are just enough "the author's barely disguised fetish" moments in the first episode to make me curious enough to watch more!
I'd agree that it's in the positive column, though not really my favorite. It does benefit from a slick production that has a good grasp of comedic timing. Even if the characters are very archetypical, they're presented with so much energy and easy chemistry that they're fun.

If anything, my major issue is with the gimmick itself. It feels tacked on to have a gimmick to put in the title, rather than something that adds much personality to the story.

No, I totally get what you're saying. People don't blurt about how they really feel about their crushes in a different language in real life. I'm fully prepared for Alya's Russian background to be reduced to a (hopefully not fetishized) character quirk instead of being presented as a genuine part of her identity. But I'm hopeful this anime takes the more interesting high road!
Really, I think it just undercuts itself by having Masachika understand what she's saying. If he didn't, there could be a fun irony between what he thinks she's saying, and what the audience knows she's saying. It could offer a sense of friction that you could mine for comedy or drama in equal measure. With Masachika knowing Russian, we basically have a standard rom-com setup between a nerdy but normal dude and a tsundere girl. That's why, as positive as I am on the premiere, it didn't stick with me the way others did.
Agreed. And before we move on, I love that the EN subtitles first have Ayle's spoken Russian on screen as Russian text. That really makes the use of a new language more distinct to my monolingual ears and makes use of a rare affordance of this artistic medium.
On a similar tangent, I love the gimmick of covering different songs for the ED in each episode. I don't know how thematically suitable Finger 5 is to this show but it's not often you hear a 50-year-old song in a new TV show.
Oh! I wasn't aware of that gimmick and love it!!!

Though speaking of Finger 5, I want to give THE finger to My Wife Has No Emotions which at first pass seems to be lifting a lot of material from the widely successful movie Her but without the charm, cinematic expertise, and maybe core themes!

Ah yes, the one show this season that genuinely made me depressed. Like, straight up just felt sad about a lot of shit after this thing finished. Is there such a genre as Accidental Dystopia?
I really, really, REALLY hope that My Wife Has No Emotions ends with the MC realizing that his gynoid coping mechanism isn't a substitute for human companionship, but the first episode doesn't inspire much confidence.
It's not like the idea of human-robot relationships is a bad one. Tons of sci-fi media have achieved that with flying colors. There's just something about this setup that makes it feel like a self-replicating cycle of depression.

This is somebody who feels socially isolated by his work-life balance. Instead of trying to change that balance, he has drawn a cute anime girl face on his rice cooker and started failing charisma checks at it.
Which I guess is technically social commentary, but instead of focusing on the underlying causes of this demoralizing situation, the show really seems to think that every dude's life would be better if a woman-shaped object in his home provided him with maternal-coded care.
Even that could work if the setting was a little more softer with its sci-fi elements. Robots in fiction are plot devices unconstrained from real-life technology and can be as human as you want. If Mina had a more discernible personality this could be a cute little whatever. Yet in the first episode, she's basically a more expensive version of a Smart Speaker and this dude's fallen in love with Alexa. It's too grounded to work as a fantasy but still wants to be one.
My Wife Has No Emotions is too serious to be a lark that acknowledges that this set-up is a medium-popular kink, and the writing isn't good enough to be a serious examination of society and the relationships that comprise it. We're in the least desirable middle ground possible and I don't want to give this IP another newton of my mental energy.
What, you don't want more of this scintillating romance?
No! I'd have far more fun talking about Days With My Stepsister, which, for an anime that shares its setup with A LOT of porn, has some of the most self-serious leads I've ever seen in a TV show.
Honestly, I think these kids need to lighten up. Weirdly, your respective parents remarried without ever introducing you to each other, but this premiere was bizarrely dour for what amounts to a pretty uneventful story so far. Have some goddamn friction from this scenario! Or some humor! Argue about somebody eating the last pudding cup, or getting your toothbrushes mixed up! Something besides these two staring blank-faced into the distance while moody piano music plays.
This is an old writing adage that I'm not even convinced is true, but if the characters aren't having fun or at least interested in the story they're a part of, how can anyone expect the audience to be interested in this story either?
You can make a story that's grounded, realistic, and still interesting. Doing so requires a much more intense level of characterization. You have to make these kids and what they're going through feel relatable and sympathetic. What we get here is two characters who don't seem to be going through much of anything. They hang out with their respective friends, exchange pleasant greetings at home, and then go about their days unperturbed. It's like having a sophomore roommate that presumably won't steel your hot plate when they move out.
Not to mention that this despondency seems to clash with other elements of their character, like the female lead's more catching design or the male lead's earnest motivation to go to a good college. Just like its main characters, I'm not feeling much of anything from Days With My Stepsister.
Well, I guess we have to get one boring stinker in every season. Thankfully there aren't any other sibling-related romances that are way less profound or interesting than they think they aaahhhhhh crap.
He's not worth it, ladies! This bookish, audience insert isn't worth jeopardizing your relationship with your sister!
The thing is, I don't even know if he's a real audience insert. All of this first episode is told from the twins' perspective. It's entirely about how much this guy means to them, how they've been in love with him for years and are willing to hurt each other over it. Yet he's so separate from them, so ephemeral that he's more of a plot device than anything.
Hey, that's not entirely fair. Jun is also a reference machine! That's technically a character trait!
It's baffling. This premiere is 20 minutes of two characters opining over an objectively regular dude, making these dramatic declarations about their feelings and themselves over relationships that don't back it up.

That's something that a Scum's Wish character can get away with saying because people actually do awful things in that show. This girl's greatest crime is having a crush and making dated nerd references.
If I'm being generous, I'd say that this show has room to grow and that we'll hopefully see the intricacies of these relationships now that the groundwork was laid in the first episode. But Love Is Indivisible by Twins also gave me no compulsion to watch beyond the first episode, so I'm probably being too charitable.
The thing about a slow burn is that you still need a spark to light the fire, and there's none of that here. It's insisting on emotions that the writing is thoroughly unable to compel from the viewer. I get that it's trying to be a serious love story, not an unhinged trash parade like Futakoi Alternative, but even a bad parade is more entertaining.
That's actually a great segue into what's on track to be my biggest guilty pleasure for the season, Too Many Losing Heroines! Unlike Twins, this show had me hooked from the get-go and it's an ensemble cast of characters are all messy bitches in a way that's immediately endearing.

It also made me laugh harder than any other episodes we watched for this column.
I'm...skeptical of this one. It's definitely more coherent and effective with what it's doing, but I'm just generally wary of Light Novel adaptations that try to be all meta about their own stories. Like yep, good job guys, you have successfully discovered the idea of Tropes. Are you going to use that power to make stronger stories or just self-consciously point them out so other people won't use them to criticize your work?
Your skepticism is well placed, as we've been burned more times than I can count with seemingly novel Light Novel adaptations. This series is definitely playing in the same ballpark as My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU and I'm doubtful that have as high a batting average as that RomCom, but I have to give it credit for being a league above the expectations set by it's weirdly meta opening.
Losing Heroines definitely has its strengths. Anna's a really funny character who's entertaining to follow. Hers is a story we don't really get to see in most anime - the jilted girl who has to watch her crush find happiness with somebody else, and doesn't react to it like a beatific saint who wishes them good luck and eternal happiness. She gets angry and sad and says some really mean things that she doesn't mean. That's a really great hook!
At the very least I'm giving this one a few more episodes. If it turns out to be a really interesting look at the kinds of people and relationships that don't usually make it into TV shows, I think I'll have a really great time! If this is genre deconstruction for deconstruction's sake; well, this season has plenty of other medium-sized hits to keep me occupied.
I think it has a lot of potential, but I wasn't a fan of Nukumizu, at least not in the way he's used here. Anna is the character driving the humor and conflict of it all, and he spends the whole episode being forced by circumstances to hang out with her and staunchly refusing to interact with that humor or conflict. He just sits and snarks from the safety of his own brain while the more interesting person is actually going through an emotional journey.
You know, that point just made me realize that I was probably able to tolerate Nukumizu's nerd-from-on-high BS because I watched Losing Heroines immediately after 2.5 Dimensional Seduction, which has THE WORST protag of the season in Masamune.

Seriously, if anyone reading this sees themselves in Masamune and has convinced themselves that their hentai kink has made them face genuine discrimination, please touch as much grass as you can find.
Ah, right, this guy. Credit where it's due, 2.5D was very successful in capturing the kind of weird jackass you'd meet in a high school manga/anime club.

It's a shame that it seemingly forgot that those guys are insufferable and hanging out with them for 20 minutes is the antithesis of entertainment.
God, I hate how accurately this guy sucks.

Also, and credit to a host of folks on BlueSky for keying me into this discourse, but most of this show's issues would go away if it just leaned into its leading lady, Amano, being queer and followed the arc of how a lot LGBTQIA folks get into the more niche communities in the broader anime fandom.
Honestly, it would just be better in general if she was the main focus to begin with. Even if Ririsa's not gay, there are plenty of things you could do with a character who enjoys presenting herself as sexy and attractive. But since we're tied to Masamune's perspective, Ririsa becomes a literal fantasy for him: a girl who likes the exact same things he does, for the exact same reasons, and is more than happy to dress up like his waifu. It's ironically a great demonstration of how framing can drastically alter the message.
I had a lot of gripes that I still stand by about My Dress-Up Darling when it came out, but I'll be the first person to admit that that anime is a WAY better exploration of people bonding over cosplay than 2.5D Seduction. The amount of skeezy male fantasy nonsense in the first episode alone made me want to clear my browser history and cookies. I'm terrified of what the ad algorithm thinks I'm into after searching for and watching this series.
Even if you don't object to Masamune's personality, there's just...not much conflict here. The biggest change for our main character is that he decides to let a single other person into his man cave because she's the exact kind of nerd he is. He doesn't grow or change outside of realizing that there are also women with his shit taste in waifus.

That's just not a compelling dynamic for a romance or a story in general.
Exactly, 2.5D Seduction isn't trying to entertain a general audience or challenge someone like Masamune, but validate them; and I can't think of a worse way to spend 22 minutes each week.
Anyway, enough with easy and noxious wish fulfillment. Let's move on to some easy and adorable wish fulfillment.
Yeah~ Pseudo Harem didn't really make me feel much, but it did have two protags that matched each other's freak, and I can respect it for that!
I really loved it. I've consumed a dangerously radioactive amount of harem series, and Pseudo Harem taps into the fun aspects of that genre while focusing on a single couple, portraying a pair of kids perfecting the art of almost admitting your real feelings, while always hiding them behind a thin layer of plausible deniability.
Aw, I'm glad you vibed with it more than I did! The "theater kid antics" vibe and art direction didn't quite work for me, but I see the appeal and can think of three people who would have insisted I watch this if it aired while I was in college.
It's not necessarily substantial, but I just really love the way it establishes things about the characters through the central gimmick. Rin is too afraid to express her feelings, so she uses pseudo-personae to play pretend, ultimately still expressing herself. Eiji suggests he wants a harem as a defensive joke, but then starts getting into Rin's game because it's something only they share - an inside joke that they can get wrapped up in and grow closer to even as they insist they're joking.
It's really sweet, and definitely in the same vein as a lot of my high school relationships; where having one or two things in common was enough to serve as the backbone of a relationship. As we've been chatting, I've realized that there's actually a pretty clean break between the "Good/Watchable" and "Bad/Unwatchable" RomComs from this season, and Pseudo Harem is definitely in the former bucket even if I won't be returning to it.
Well if theater isn't your bag, can I interest you in some cinematic offerings?
Oh man, I have THOUGHTS on Twilight Out of Focus, Nick! I love that this is a RomCom that focuses on two male characters that, at first pass, are pretty well defined and not reduced to their sexuality or having that identity while existing within a heteronormative society. However, this anime absolutely reeks of being written by and for BL fans, rather than the queer community. Then again, should that intent matter if this anime and its characters are fairly nuanced representatives of people with these identities?

I think all of this is to say that I need to watch more of it to have more concrete opinions on it, haha.
Personally, I don't think it's really worth worrying too much about who it may or may not be written "for" right now. There are plenty of queer BL fans of all stripes, and the genre itself has a long history of self-reference. Sometimes that makes for simple and charming love stories like Sasaki & Miyano. Other times it means including some convoluted genre ideas that will baffle a general audience, like the current trend of Omegaverse BL. I think it's best to let the material speak for itself, and so far Twilight is certainly trying.
That's definitely a more optimistic way to look at it, and I'll try my best to emulate that! You know what show doesn't seem to be trying, though? Magical Girl & the Evil Lieutenant.

Sure, the Madoka reference got a laugh out of me, but really all this first episode did was make me want to watch Love After World Domination. My affinity for that older show probably means that I can't give this one a fair shake; but when the premises are so similar, I can't help but compare the two.
You're getting the timeline mixed up there. LAWD may have gotten an adaptation first - more on why that happened in a second - but Magical Girl beat it to the punch in manga form by half a decade.

That's also part of why the humor here might feel overly familiar. We've gotten a lot of shows with similar dynamics in the time since the manga came out and this adaptation happened. Magical Girl didn't invent the idea of parodying the Romeo & Juliet romances between Good Guys and Bad Guys in kids shows, but it was still ahead of the curve compared to most of the series you can compare to.

Then this might be a "needs more time in the oven" situation for me. Magical Girl is fine, but I'm not confident that it has much of a hook outside its core premise. The leads right now are a little too vague for my taste, whereas Desumi and Fudo were built up as lovable weirdos right out of the gate in World Domination.
Being half-length does make it feel a little slight, but it's hard for me to be too critical of either aspect knowing that the show is basically a labor of love to honor the mangaka, Cocoa Fujiwara, who unexpectedly died in 2015 when this adaptation was first being planned. The manga was left unfinished at just 3 volumes, and the anime was shelved for nearly a decade. It only exists now because some producers were determined to fulfill what they'd started for Fujiwara.
Oh no!!! I wasn't aware of the backstory of this production! That all sucks and good on this team for getting this project out better late than never. That doesn't change my read on it very much, but I would have been a lot more polite in expressing that opinion if I had known more about this anime's circumstances.
Eh, it's cool. Most people watching this probably won't look into the larger circumstances around it, so I think offering a critique from that angle is fair. However, I will say that no amount of overplay could drag down how god-damned good this show looks.
Oh, absolutely! I wish there was a bit more meat on these bones, but there's a damn good-looking skeleton in, Magical Girl!

Also, feel free to push back on me, but I feel like we've saved the best for last with Senpai is an Otokonoko!
Oh hell yeah, we did. While it's started with a fairly soft touch, I feel confident saying this show has the highest ceiling of anything we've covered. You might even say it's a whale of a tale.
God, this show packs SO MUCH into existing and dating as a gender-nonconforming person into just the first episode and, even if the animation is more economical in stretches, the acting and familiarity with this subject matter more than make up for any shortcomings.
It's pretty simple in terms of the character dynamics. Saki's into Makoto, both before and after learning they're AMAB. Makoto's childhood friend, Ryuji is super protective of Makoto and clearly crushing. So far so love triangle. The conflict comes instead from how Makoto's internalized the various aggressions and rejections of their gender presentation, and how that's made it difficult to trust or answer Saki's affection. It's the kind of stuff you know will punch you in the chest at some point, but it's all lighthearted enough to never feel too heavy.
On top of that, Otokonoko trusts its audience enough to throw us right into the middle of its story. The first episode doesn't spend more time than necessary setting up these characters, their backgrounds, or their dynamics. We see them start bouncing off each other IMMEDIATELY and gain an affinity for them through their words, actions, and hijinks. Just rock-solid writing all around.
I wouldn't say it's laugh-out-loud funny, but the energy and likability of these kids kept a smile on my face the whole time, riiiight until the closing scene of episode one stomped on my heart with a football cleat. It's good stuff, and definitely the one I'd recommend to anyone looking to scratch their RomCom itch. Other titles here might work too, but this has the strongest Warm Fuzzies quotient of any of the lot.
Senpai is an Otokonoko definitely became the anime I'm looking forward to the most week after week thanks to this column. While I'd recommend a number of the anime we've discussed tonight based on someone's preference, Otokonoko really feels like something special and a series people will keep talking about long after this season has wrapped.
That said, don't limit yourself to just one. I love romcoms because they hold such a vast variety, and it's always good to try new things. So if any of these seem like they might interest you, give them a try. They might just awaken something in you.
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