SPOILER-FREE
This review was originally written in July 2021, published as a YouTube video on my channel.

If you were to ask me what genre of story I hate, the answer I’d give is that I don’t hate any, and that’s the truth. What I will say however is that while there are no genres I hate, there are genres that for whatever reason give me more trouble than other ones, and that varies from person to person. I mentioned in my Those Snow White Notes review that music anime and I don’t precisely see eye-to-eye that often, and romantic comedy would be the other one that immediately comes to mind. Regardless, I do find it important to see entertainment in those genres that give you trouble, because as I often say to my own music students, “There are no genres you dislike – there are merely pieces of music you like in those genres that you have yet to listen to.” Finding those things can be quite fulfilling.

Osamake: The Romcom Where the Childhood Friend Won’t Lose was a romantic comedy that I chose to watch for the Spring 2021 anime season. Much like with After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway, the long title alone caught my attention. As with the previous show though, I was aware that a long, silly title could also just be an attempt to clickbait me into giving this show my online traffic. But that’s the risk you take with any entertainment, after all; you never know what you’re going to get when you dive in.
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Sueharu Maru is a former famous child actor who eventually left the acting business and went on to live as normal a high school life as one could hope for. After rejecting the affection of his childhood friend Kuroha Shida, he himself feels rejected when he learns that his first love, Shirokusa Kachi, has a boyfriend of her own. Taking up the opportunity to both help him get revenge and possibly get him to fall for her instead, Kuroha proposes a plan for Sueharu and herself to start dating to make Shirokusa jealous.

So, we have ourselves our love triangle with Kuroha and Shirokusa as the love interests, and Sueharu as the center which everything revolves around. With a title like The Romcom Where the Childhood Friend Won’t Lose, everything already sounds like a foregone conclusion. After all, it’s established early on that Kuroha is the childhood friend, and the title is a dead giveaway, except that it isn’t. As the story progresses, we see not only a third girl, named Momosaka, get thrown into the running, but it turns out that all three of them are somehow connected to Sueharu’s past as childhood friends. So, the title of the show is true, but only by virtue of the fact that its very design means that the one who wins Sueharu’s heart doesn’t ultimately matter. You can’t claim false advertising if all roads do in fact lead to Rome.

The task thus becomes trying to determine which of these childhood friends is not only the best pick for Sueharu, but also which one will actually win his heart. As one might expect, the comedy of the series derives from the girls trying to win his heart through various means, which only manages to work to mixed success. Part of this is because Sueharu himself isn’t too compelling of a character; despite being an acclaimed former child-actor, he’s so easily flustered that the show can’t utilize the idea of an actor keeping his composure in the face of this unusual pressure. It was, funnily enough, the three girls being antagonistic towards each other that managed to provide the best comedic entertainment in the show. The ways that they are able to get under each other’s skin whether through what they do with Sueharu or the things that they say to each other manage to derive some sense of satisfaction.

The satisfaction that the show manages to pull off early on in its run unfortunately hits a snag shortly afterwards. A lot of time and energy is spent trying to create this new secondary plot that involves all the main characters, complete with them effectively starting their own entertainment ventures, which is also tied to Sueharu’s past as well. In getting involved in these attempts to achieve a deeper level of depth and understanding, the show actually stalls out rather than moves forward. It creates a bit of an identity crisis; Osamake doesn’t quite know whether it wants to be a high school romantic comedy or a coming-of-age-reconciling-with-your-past entrepreneurial story, made worse by the fact that the coming-of-age element isn’t as sharp or engaging as the earlier romcom element. But it does give us our obligatory beach episode, so if nothing else, it contributes that.

Even if one were to try putting aside the business aspect of the story, the romcom component itself doesn’t necessarily offer anything terribly interesting. Because each of the love interests is somehow connected to Sueharu’s past, any potential hijinks that may ensue end up having to take a back seat to the coming-of-age plot and talking about that past. It also doesn’t help matters that these characters aren’t the most-pleasant group of girls, either. Like I mentioned, their antagonistic attitudes towards one another does fuel some of the funnier moments in the show, but it doesn’t do the idea of them as girlfriends any favors. Osamake falls into the trap that a lot of romantic comedy stories with multiple potential partners fall into – namely, almost everyone involved is so vain and desperate to win the central character’s affection that he’d frankly be better off just dumping everyone and moving on.

Not that he’d ever be able to, because Sueharu is presented as such a “nice guy” that it means he spends so much of the series attempting to walk the line as he keeps getting caught in the girls’ crossfire. While romantic comedies sometimes rely on delaying a final decision until the absolute last-minute, the feelings being sent his way are so blunt that it’s shocking that he hasn’t decided yet. Then again, he laments in the beginning of the series that he has never had a girlfriend, but if these are the kinds of people that he’s attracting, then maybe he’s better off being by himself.

This is best exemplified with two of the love interests – Kuroha and Momosaka. Both have the same problem of trying to be so overtly manipulative of Sueharu’s feelings that any attempt they make to win him over feels so devoid of earnestness. There’s one particular plot involving Kuroha in the middle of the show that was so poorly thought out and even-more-poorly executed that it effectively destroyed any compulsion I had to see her character develop her relationship with Sueharu. Momosaka seemed to just force herself into the story and push the entrepreneurial aspect onto everything, which I’ve already talked about as not being a strength of the show.

One other problem that Osamake runs into is the fact that the original story itself is not yet over. As is occasionally the case with anime adaptations, the source material is being written and published around the same time that the anime is airing, leaving the production staff with two possible options if the anime version is ending – either invent an ending exclusive to the anime version, or have things be open-ended to drum up interest for the original work to bring in new readers. An open-ended final episode can work, but that often involves the risk of leaving too many things unresolved or leaving the story petering out. This series falls into the latter category; there is obviously more material that could be had given the manner by which the series ended, but it couldn’t succeed in getting me to want to read further on. I longed for it to be over, not to keep going.
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Osamake: The Romcom Where the Childhood Friend Won’t Lose was an unfortunate attempt to take the clickbait romcom harem and try and turn it into something more heartfelt. Its attempts to inject growth and development for its main character and the love interests only succeeded in dragging down the comedy and leaving it starving for a means to keep itself interesting. Combined with a roster of rather unlikable characters, a main character too dim and naïve about what to do for his own good even by romcom standards, and many moments that come across as either flat or making me want to shake my head, and you have one of the more skippable shows from Spring 2021. The comedic moments that worked, and there definitely were a few, aren’t enough. Even if I wanted to think of this series as “trash entertainment” like I have with some other shows, I couldn’t bring myself to like it at that level either. Its various ideas just didn’t coalesce, and the fanservice did nothing for me.