This review will be long, and spoiler heavy

Yes, those are actually the lyrics by the way... Comedy. Absolute comedy.

I believe that this anime was designed to make me viscerally angry, and most definitely achieved that, as I don’t think I have despised an anime so much since I started watching anime entirely. Before you all start ratio-ing me, I will try to explain the best I can why this show did not work for me personally, and this review is in no way designed to change your mind if you enjoy this show.

I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit, the fact that this is a wish-fulfillment fantasy aimed toward an adolescent to young adult male audience. Everyone knows that. It promotes a very poor view of women in general, and a very patriarchal view at that, insinuating that all a girl is useful for is cooking and cleaning, which in this day and age, is a very old-fashioned way of thinking, and behind the times. There is zero sense of realism here, as the fact that the whole premise is kick started by Amane, our main male protagonist, seeing Mahiru, our main female protagonist, looking down in the dumps while sitting in the rain. To be a nice person, he hands her his umbrella, to stop her from getting a cold, which I never understood, but as the age old anime trope goes, being in the rain for more than five minutes will make you extremely sick the next day. Mahiru accepts said umbrella, and after the revelation that they’re actually next door neighbours, she proceeds to take care of Amane, starting by nursing him back to health, then cooking for him, and cleaning his mess of a house. Now, helping out someone after they helped you out doesn’t seem all that out of the question, but she does it EVERY DAY, looking like a newlywed wife in the process. I’ll talk about the relationship between the two characters soon, but to say there is any sense of realism here is baffling to me. It encourages the fact that the world is transactional. You do a good deed, and you expect to get something in return. That does exist in our world today, and it’s fine, but when the return of a good deed gets this blown out of proportion, it made for a poor premise out of the gates. It reads as a self insert anime which completely throws the meaning of romance out. Romance doesn’t wait for you a lot of the times, effort needs to be put in.

Now, let’s talk about Amane. He’s your typical romcom protagonist who’s a bit awkward, a bit of an outcast, he constantly self-deprecates himself, and doesn’t have the best living conditions or backstory. He has zero personality. Zilch. Nada. His “personality” is built upon such a shallow backstory of him getting used by other people in the past for his money. Like I said before, this anime says a lot about a transactional world, so it’d be great if him and Mahiru could have connected over this theme, but it just didn’t happen. This past of his is supposed to make us sympathize with him I guess, or relate to him, but the fact that he decided to move out from his own home to another school and live alone, while he can’t take care of himself is just way too much. His parents approved of this too? It really wasn’t all that serious, it wasn’t even that they were physically bullying him. We also see that he seems to not trust other people a lot, as seen when he interacted with Kadowaki, and that just makes me chuckle, since that sad backstory of his wasn’t much at all. Give me a break. Does he improve throughout the story, to an extent, yes, but not nearly enough for me to consider him a remotely well written character.

On to Mahiru, she has this angel persona that just doesn’t bode well for me. Sure, she cook good, she clean good, she cute, but what else is there to her character? Her backstory is that her parents neglected her and now she has to take care of herself, and then her mom waltzes in on her during the anime and just says more mean things. The writer is simply dumping every bad thing imaginable onto Mahiru’s backstory just so we “sympathize” with her, or to allow Amane to sympathize with her, but the backstory means nothing if it’s not explored meaningfully in present time. Aside from the backstory, her angel persona is annoying to see, because she clearly doesn’t like acting like that at school. So what if she just dropped her persona? Would everyone stop liking her? I doubt that, but even if it did, she would still have Amane, Itsuki, and Chitose. I always say that it’s not the amount of friends you have that matters, it’s how many friends who will have your back no matter what, that’s what truly matters.

Now, as for the side characters, Itsuki and Chitose, they don’t add much to the story except for being the peanut gallery to Amane and Mahiru’s relationship. They definitely have more vibrant personalities and a better relationship than Amane and Mahiru do, but that didn’t contribute to any progression.

Finally, to the meat of what I wanted to talk about in this review, was the romance between Amane and Mahiru. Now, let me preface this discussion by saying that many romance anime have “Will they, won’t they?” progressions, or confessions that don’t happen until really far into the series. Most of the time, that is fine, as long as the progression is meaningful. I consider myself to like most romance anime that I watch, so these kinds of formulas are not new to me.

Romance stories which have a delayed confession can be considered realistic sometimes, because I’m sure most of us think that confessing to someone is one the most difficult things. If you’ve known the person a long time, you like to keep to the status quo. A lot of the times, when there is no time-sensitive factors involved, such as the other person moving far away, or the threat of them loving someone else, many people would think, “Why change how our relationship is right now, after all, it’s too embarrassing to admit my feelings.”

The fundamental reason why this relationship simply doesn’t work for me, aside from the premise itself, is that Amane and Mahiru have been with each other for at least half a year, and most of that time has been spent in the same home together, yet, they somehow didn’t get together for so long. You might argue and say that this type of formula is quite common in romance anime, since the romance progression usually is slow, but to that, I’ll say, “Most romance anime don’t have the main duo together for 95% of the anime!” By having these two together all the time, there is no internal monologue that can be found, at least in Mahiru’s point of view, and if there were some internal thoughts from Mahiru that we could have seen, it would have made it a least a little more engaging to watch. Time and time again, Amane also insinuates that Mahiru is being too carefree around a guy like him, and questions her what she would do if he made a move. He also questions her a lot of what she sees in a guy like him, which is self-deprecating. To that, I’d say, please read the room. If Amane paid any attention to how his interactions with Mahiru have been going, you’d have to see that Mahiru has been enjoying her time around him. I know dense male protagonists are common, but this show danced around their relationship for so long, it got aggravating quite quickly. Emotional suppression to this degree should not be seen as a virtue, it is pure stupidity. The status quo might be comfortable, but when they’ve been virtually cohabitating for this long, it’s baffling how they still insisted they were not in a relationship for this long, despite all the touching, patting, and hand holding in public. The fact that they did all this while not in a relationship, while doing all this made the entire show devoid of any meaning, and all the interactions felt useless since by their standards, it doesn’t mean anything remotely romantic anyway. The dialogue certainly didn’t help either, as it was extremely repetitive.

Simply put, romance does not work like this at all. I don’t know if the show was trying to be realistic, but if it was, that is simply laughable. By having the two characters not confess to each other and hold their feelings in is supposed to be wholesome? In the end, even with the backstories that Amane and Mahiru shared to each other, their relationship still feels superficial and shallow, as they don’t have much of an organic connection together, it all just comes from an umbrella being handed to a poor girl in the rain on the swings. Suddenly, she literally becomes his “wife” or “maid” or even “mother”. The world just doesn’t revolve that way, there is no realism in thinking that one day, the perfect girl of your dreams is going to drop down into your lap and become your maid, girlfriend, whatever you want to call it. Romance and love are not a one-way street, an organic relationship has to be formed.

Now, to the production side of things. It was not good, and most of it was outsourced to other studios anyway, so did Project No.9 even work on this? The animation was a slideshow to put it lightly, the expressions were bland, and the settings were dull. Most of the anime was just Amane and Mahiru on the couch talking like NPCs. Amane’s house was so bland as well. A beige coloured background with nothing on it, not even posters or other interesting furniture. This all screams laziness and a poor production schedule as well. The music was fine, but the OP did not capture the essence of the anime at all. The OP is energetic and fun, while the anime was as interesting as watching paint dry on a wall.

I enjoyed the first two episodes of this show, but after that, the relationship got so drawn out to the point where not even a confession could save the trainwreck that this was. Endless edging basically, is what happened here. I cannot believe that this series can pass itself as a realistic portrayal of romance, because I just don’t see it. What fun is there if the characters just dance around the relationship with the same dialogue over and over again? It portrays characters in the most monotonous and boring of ways, and any semblance of growth in the characters was not good enough.

If you were able to enjoy this show, great, all the power to you. This review is just what I think, and not a reflection of what you have to think. I would never wish for people to hate what they watch.

For everyone who is read to the end, I truly appreciate it, and thank you for hearing me out.