SPOILER-FREE!
During an early scene, Hanabi and Mugi are on the school’s rooftop, reflecting on the feelings that they share for their certain someone. Lamenting the pain they both feel, they begin to yet again indulge in a series of motions and sensations tinged with bittersweet taste. Every kiss, as intimately and erotically depicted as it can be both with its animated smoothness and sound directing, is a lie – there is no love to be found between these two. The sun is blaring on the hot day for the world below, but in the world between these two people, there is nothing but a frosty, soul-rendering coldness.

Scum’s Wish relies on a rather daring premise: create a romance story devoid of virtually any warming affection. In theory, it breaks the cardinal rule of all romance. How is one supposed to sympathize with the romantic endeavors of its characters if everything that transpires is so cold to the touch? But the anime has no time for dealing with emotional pleasantries and frivolity; these characters are already miserable at the start. Their behavior is the sort that we’ve come to recognize, in each of our own ways and in our own experiences, as being one of the most-alarming red flags: filling an empty space with a substitution of what you really want, and praying that you don’t wake up from the temporary, dreamy refuge it provides.

Hanabi and Mugi are drawn together through their mutual suffering – each feel completely unrequited love for someone in their lives, and each carries a rather disconcerting stigma if it were to be realized, anyway. Hanabi’s feelings are for her childhood friend and now homeroom teacher Narumi, while Mugi is yearning for Akane, his former middle school tutor and now teacher. These are characters crying out for their feelings to be heard. Alas, they do not have the courage to take the leap and let their feelings be known. They cling to the false hope that because they are sure their love is so unrequited, they can rely on the other to be someone to feel some kind of affection without the underlying substance that would ordinarily come with.

But the human heart is not so simple, especially in the throes of affection. Their feelings are forced to watch the world turn through a window rather than stepping beyond the threshold and chancing being affirmed or rejected. Staying put however, as the characters each gradually begin to realize, is in and of itself a rejection of a far more sinister sort – it rots from the inside, causing them to make decisions that they know on some levels are wrongly thought-out or short-sighted. Scum’s Wish does not celebrate the pain of heartbreak or unrequited love, but treats it and the wounds it can inflict as a harsh, truthful reality of relationships. Physical affection, whether rules are outlined or otherwise, affords a temporary haven from such ailing.

Within even that however is an even more quintessential truth: divorcing physical affection from its emotional component is not so easily done. That’s not to say it’s impossible, but rather that it’s presumptuous to think it can be done so cleanly right away. Hanabi and Mugi’s relationship is presented to their surrounding students and loved ones as real, especially to a casual onlooker who may be privy to their making out and doesn’t care to examine further. But the two, and we as an audience, know better. Their relationship is a complete fabrication, a paper-thin safehouse where they can find an interiority and no one outside can enter. It is, paradoxically, within that illusion of affection that they find one another so mesmerizingly-comforting and open up, albeit to someone that they promise to use mostly to help sexually or emotionally vent.

But emotional barriers still separate them, both in terms of their own actual feelings and their own histories. Mugi’s past is fraught with encounters Hanabi never experienced, and Hanabi’s emotional entanglements are more intertwined in a way that Mugi doesn’t understand. Others that they know become involved as well. In their moments of intimacy, the characters try to ingratiate themselves and block out the emotional noise that could disrupt it. The blocking out is possible because, oh, to be touched…

Having sex, being touched and kissed, and feeling wanted all feel good, regardless of whether one takes a biological or emotional perspective. In some form, they’re all an acknowledgement of your existence and that there’s someone there with you. Feeling wanted especially is the magnetism that draws so many of the characters to do what they do, even if they know that them being wanted in the moment by the other is itself a lie. That lie allows a moment of forgetting that there exists a world beyond the body of the person you’re being intimate with. Scum’s Wish utilizes carnal instinct without any attached pornography and feels all the rawer and more uncensored because of that, as though we’re gazing into melancholic sexual dreams made real for these people.

Yet the moment of forgetting will surely end, and the characters are left to pick up the messy pieces of not only what they just did, but the ways it changed how they feel both about their unrequited loved ones and the people they just shared this illusionary moment with. No one in Scum’s Wish escapes unscathed; whether it’s through being metaphorically stomped upon or through tiny emotional cuts, the illusions and lack of emotionality cause real damage.

And there are some who have, to be sure, mastered that illusionary art more than others, both in terms of taking advantage of it and being taken advantage of. Hanabi and Mugi may be practiced in keeping their feelings to themselves, but they cannot quite compartmentalize so cleanly. Akane, however, revels in such matters. For her, the art of flings and nights in love hotels is so second nature to her, as are her thoughts on using men to get what she wants. One could draw the reasonable conclusion that it has moved beyond second nature for her and, in fact, become her truth. She holds no reservations about what she does, whether it be in the naked presence of her lovers or in stabbing other women with her coy bluntness. Her smile, delicately captured in smooth pink coloring and line work, always reads as though there is something waiting to bite back at the opportune moment. Her voice when the lights are low is like that of a well-trained actress, who knows precisely how to get her lovers (or the viewers, for that matter) to deliver the lines she wants to hear.

And narratively on the whole, Scum’s Wish pulls a similar trick. In the midst of the characters’ woes and self-perpetuating lies, it manages to always keep its hooks firmly planted by delivering tiny touches of seduction. The result is getting voluntarily subsumed into its dark swirl of emotional turbulence. We know these characters are fictitious and illusionary, but the realness of their situations is never lost. As the episodes and descension continue, it gets increasingly uncomfortable as the apprehension that any sort of happy ending won’t occur sets in. In that way, perhaps the viewer is like Hanabi and Mugi – desperately holding onto hopes we believe are false, but not wanting to let go, even though it means more lies in wait.
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Scum’s Wish is a romance absent the affection, but is all the more hypnotizingly-erotic because of it. It uses the self-destructive impulses of broken hearts to draw us into a labyrinth of confusions, contradictions, and characters who know their actions are causing more harm than good, but cannot stop themselves from indulging further. It is only in the crystalline moments when the chains are broken that love’s warmth can finally be felt, and actual, proper connection and affection can begin. The series dares to argue that shyness, keeping your feelings at bay, your connections withheld, and your lies going will only lead to more misery, a type that is infinitely harder to move on from. Clinging to the lie will not make the problem go away. Scum’s Wish damns that behavior while affirming that earnest, heartfelt feelings are meant to be shared. That is, naturally, only the first step. Even if your heart may still be broken when the sun goes down, regardless of what comes after physically or emotionally, it is better to be sadder but wiser.

And that is precisely what Scum’s Wish is – sad, but wise.