Like many anime protagonists of the past, Rentaro Aijo has one major problem in his life... He just can’t get a girlfriend for the life of him! Yes, he may be allegedly smart, athletic and popular, but when it comes to asking girls out, his record has recently reached zero wins and one hundred losses, the first of which happened way back when he was just learning to talk. His luck is about to change, though, because he’s soon informed by the God of Love that his problems are coming to an end... And his new problems are just about to begin. For you see, waiting just around the corner for him upon his entrance to high school, is not only one soul mate, but one hundred! Yes, due to a clerical error on the part of the God of Love, there are one hundred soul mates waiting for Rentaro, which is enough to make most boys’ wildest dreams come true! The catch, however, is that if he fails to secure his destiny with them, the ones he doesn’t live happily ever after with are going to die. He may have Cupid on his side, but the deadliest arrows will be the ones that miss.
Hey guys, have you ever heard of Bibury Animation Studio? I sure as hell haven’t, at least not until tonight. Apparently they’re a relatively newer anime studio, and the only product of theirs that I’ve seen aside from this one was Azur Lane, yet another Strike Witches rip-off that I saw less than a year ago, and yet can barely remember. I also haven’t heard of director Hikaru Sato before, nor have I seen either of his two previous directorial efforts, but given my obsession with the anime scene of 2013, I’m probably going to check out Chronicles of the Going Home Club at some point in the future. Needless to say, The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really Love You doesn’t have the most astounding pedigree behind it, in fact, its name is probably longer than its family tree. Still, just because the entities behind an anime are extremely young and kind of unproven doesn’t always spell disaster, so how exactly did this relatively young Director and Studio’s collaboration work out?
Well, I’m happy to say that this review IS going to start out on a positive note, because from a visual standpoint, this anime is basically perfect. The animation is flawlessly produced, never showing any real signs of budgetary restrictions, and it never fails to show exactly as much energy as it needs to at any given moment, often with a little extra flourish of effort just to add an extra touch to any given sight gag. The colors are sharp enough that characters you’re supposed to be paying attention to are never struggling to catch your eye, and they’re aided by a tight sense of framing and visual direction. This show likes to dabble in absurdity from time to time, so most visual gags ARE diegetic within the universe of the story, so there’s never any confusion over whether or not they’re actually happening (magic potion giving a girl bunny ears for example), yet these effects are able to blend into the environment while still feeling just alien enough to get a reaction.
The character designs are also really strong, with each of Rentaro’s girlfriends looking highly distinctive compared to other characters in the background, while still never feeling over-designed, and elements of their appearances do communicate the more important aspects of their identities and personalities. They are color-coded, because of course they are, you gotta do what you gotta do for waifu merchandise purposes, but the colors they chose are pleasant enough. I guess if I had to make a complaint, it’s that they blush a little too much for my liking, but that’s a nitpick. I guess it’s also true that Rentaro himself looks a little on the generic side, but he makes up for it by being a surprisingly expressive character, both in his body language and his facial expressions, and especially his eyes. Honestly, this show does a lot of impressive work with the eyes of the characters. For a relatively early effort from both the director and the studio, 100 Girlfriends is a damn fine looking show.
The same thing mostly goes for the English dub, with a few small caveats. The dub was apparently produced by Crunchyroll... No, it doesn’t say Funimation as far as I can tell, it just says Crunchyroll itself... And while there are a few too many instances of modern day slang in the dialogue that sound a bit cringe, the translations are good for the most part. The cast is also made up primarily of newer voice actors to the scene, with only two names in the principal cast that I recognize, and the rest only having a handful of starring roles apiece prior to this series. Travis Mullenix is a breath of fresh air, bringing a very welcome level of extra energy to his role, and Sarah Weidenheft adds the right amount of unhinged undertones to her otherwise dainty delivery. Ariel Graham may have gone a bit too shrill and raspy, but everyone else is fine. I don’t really have anything interesting to say about any of them, they all do their jobs well... The guy who plays The God of Love has also played Bowser in a ton of Mario Projects, which is interesting... It’s just a really solid dub.
It’s not very often that I go into an anime with no plans whatsoever to review it, only to realize by the end that no, I definitely need to sit down and sort my feelings out. I don’t shoot from the hip like that very often, and to be honest, I wasn’t even planning to WATCH this anime so soon, the only reason I picked it up earlier this morning was because I was having trouble getting into Knights and Magic, and I dropped that Multi Hit Combo Mother Anime for becoming gross softcore incest porn way faster than I expected. Now that we're here, I might as well give credit where it’s due, this series got off to a pretty good start. The comedy was really condensed, throwing out joke after joke, and I’d say enough of the jokes landed to keep my interest. The premise had a lot of potential(Which, in retrospect, I also said about Mother Multi-hit at first), and I liked the three main characters... You know, Rentaro and his first two waifus, the straightforward Karane and the duplicitous Hakari, I thought they had an interesting dynamic and a lot of chemistry and I wanted to see how they would be able to navigate the trials and tribulations of a polyamorous relationship. Sure, the story arc about them sorting out who would get Rentaro’s first kiss was long, dumb and unfunny, but it wasn’t THAT tedious, and I figured I could look past that much. I also liked the vice principal, she was pretty funny. I'm pretty sure her character was stolen from Hare+Guu, and if I'm right, what an inspired rip-off. Good job.
But then the third episode happened, and things started to go rapidly downhill as I began to realize a few troubling details about the story. First off, while I had no doubt that the future additions to Rentaro’s harem were going to have distinct personalities and unique identities, the road to them accepting his bigamist relationship conditions was never going to be as compelling as it was for the first two waifus. Second, while the gimmick behind his third waifu WAS interesting... She carries around a book that she’s memorized, and points to different passages in order to communicate with people without speaking... Rentaro’s solution to this was jaw-droppingly stupid. He copied every page of her book onto a handheld device so she could just point to a passage and have it read aloud for her, which I get was supposed to illustrate his kindness and dedication, but like... Why not give her a cell phone with a text-to-speech feature? Maybe I’m overthinking it, but like, I could not get over how much easier this would have been for him, and how much more convenient it would have been for her.
Anyway, I guess you could say that I started picking up that the writing in this series wasn’t just going to be dumb in a few isolated moments. This was further proven by a scene where the third girl claimed she didn’t want to kiss Rentaro because she wanted to remain chaste until marriage. What hit me like a ton of bricks at that moment was that the very mention of marriage as a thing in any context... Especially in the context of one of the waifus getting married... Was disastrous for the premise of this anime. For a character to mention marriage, at all, and for the rest of the cast to hear this and not start pointing out that Rentaro was only going to be able to legally marry one person and then fighting over it, it was like taking out a large pair of scissors and just cutting my suspension of disbelief in half. A smart story goes out of its way to avoid bringing up any topics that might start to poke holes in its plot, but as I would soon come to discover, this series is dumber than a box of dildoes.
To give you an idea of how dumb this series is, let’s skip ahead to the kissing zombies episode. Yes, just like Miraculous Ladybug, this series has a kissing zombies episode. To give you the short explanation, one of Rentaro’s girlfriends is a scientist, and she accidentally gives the other girls a potion that makes them uncontrollably crave kisses from their beloved. They go after Rentaro, and he runs because I don’t fucking know, hasn’t he already been kissed by all of them before? Like several times? Even when they catch him and kiss him, there’s no real effect, it doesn’t hurt him. After defeating and/or indisposing every girl but the smart girl, he has the opportunity to distract her so the science girl can get to her lab to grab an antidote, he rejects that plan on the grounds that the smart girl would catch him if he ran... Which NO FUCKING SHIT, LET HER CATCH YOU, THAT’S THE DISTRACTION! And they go with a different, stupider plan instead, which of course fails. Fucking Strike Witches did a better zombie parody episode.
By the way, according to the God of Love, the soul mate connection is supposed to be felt instantly... Or at the very least, the female side was supposed to feel it instantly. So explain to me how it is that when Rentaro’s blinded, sitting down in front of one of his soul mates, neither one feels the connection until his sight comes back? The person who wrote this anime does know that reality doesn’t work the way Peekaboo does, right? Just because you can’t see somebody, doesn’t mean they can’t see you. For the record, I was asking if a five year old wrote this anime BEFORE this moment. Well, maybe not 5, but early on, I was getting the impression that 100 Girlfriends was written by someone very young whose only experience with actual relationship dynamics was watching harem anime and naively thinking "Why can't they share him?" While doing a ton of mental gymnastics to imagine everyone getting along under these circumstances, and just kinda half-heartedly coming up with that Soul Mates backstory to excuse it all.
Now you may read that and think “So what? It’s a parody. It’s dumb and exaggerated because it’s making fun of other harem shows.” Except no, parodies are supposed to be somewhat smart. Satire has no excuse to not be smart. If you're going to satirize the harem genre, and your selling point is "What if they just all agreed to date him, instead of just spending the entire series fighting over him?" Well, I would expect some kind of actual examination of that premise. What does being in a bigamist relationship mean to any of these characters? Rentaro knows about his 'love them all or die' situation, but why are the girls so willing to accept his terms and share him? Is anybody going to call out all of the future implications of this arrangement? Or hey, here's a question; If any of his soul mates refused to be one of this arrangement, and inadvertently put her own life in danger, how would Rentaro act under those circumstances? I would imagine at least a few of those 100 girls would have some kind of reservations about being added to a literal girlfriend collection, so how hard would it actually be for him to survive under these circumstances? I’m sorry if I’m overthinking it, but it’s hard for me to be invested in a story where I have all of these implications swarming around my head that the story idiotically refuses to consider.
On another note, most harem anime are comedies. Most parodies are comedies. Making a comedy that makes fun of other comedies is extremely tricky, because if it winds up being really funny on its own merits, it just joins the genre it was trying to parody. If it fails to be significantly funny, it winds up looking pathetic for insulting its superiors. The only way to succeed on these terms is to be smart enough to have something deliberate and recognizable to SAY about the genre, and even then, being too mean-spirited can make it all backfire. You want to know about a movie that openly parodied the most common comedy conventions of the time, and made damn sure everyone knew what it was doing, and made all of it’s points clearly and concisely? Freddy Got Fingered. Yep. Even the most focused efforts at parodying comedy can lead to complete embarrassing train wrecks, and suffice to say, 100 Girlfriends does not put forth its best effort. It has nothing to say about anime comedy, because it doesn’t even have the self-awareness to say anything about itself, and at any rate, it's just too dumb to be funny on purpose.
100 Girlfriends is one of those shows that just keeps getting worse. Every time I think it has finally hit rock bottom, it stuns me. It just gets dumber and dumber, adamantly refusing to pay a single thought to the logic and implications of its own writing, until in the final few episodes, it finally crosses a line that it can not possibly come back from. This is where things are going to get a little complicated, because not only do we have spoilers to discuss, I’d also like to start what I believe to be a pretty important discussion about the current state of the anime fandom. I’m going to touch on a serious spoiler, and some equally serious subject matter, so if you don’t want to deal with either right now, you can go ahead and skip to the final paragraph.
First, regarding the spoiler, let’s just rip the bandaid off right now. One of Rentaro’s soul mates is the mother of one of his other soul mates. She had her only daughter while still a minor herself, despite never kissing the father(I don’t think it was ever explained why they didn’t kiss?), but she has to be at least around thirty, right? And Rentaro has just entered High School. Not only do they make out and proclaim their love for each other, but if you’ve been paying attention to the text of the series, the God of Love made this woman a sexual predator by making her one of Rentaro’s destined waifus. Why is nobody else talking about this? Why is everybody giving this series such high scores, going as far as to call it fucking wholesome, despite the writer just casually and non-critically having his minor protagonist be groomed by an adult woman? I’ve touched on this before in previous reviews, but there seems to be a huge double standard among anime fans when it comes to problematic material.
People shun Brother’s Conflict for it’s non-consensual reverse-harem content, but they don’t apply the same scrutiny towards more common harem anime where the women are throwing themselves at protesting and non-consenting guys. Plenty of people have condemned Jobless Reincarnation because an adult man trapped in a little boy’s body acts inappropriately with a little girl, but you don’t hear anybody complaining about Lucoa being inappropriate with poor Shota in Dragon Maid. People also rip Jobless Reincarnation for letting an adult trapped in a thirteen year old’s body sleep with a fifteen year old, but nobody says anything about a seventeen year old boy in Scum’s Wish sleeping with his adult teacher. Nobody talks about the Grisaia prequels, where it’s revealed that not only did the main character start having sex with his adult mentor at age 12, but she then encouraged him to literally rape her drunk friend. People talk about the uncomfortable age differences in Cardcaptor Sakura, what with Sakura’s mother marrying her father when she was his sixteen year old student, and Sakura’s adult teacher being betrothed to her ten year old friend, but nobody says jack shit about Touya in middle school dating HIS teacher. It’s almost like nobody cares about things like pedophilia, ephebophilia, grooming, harrassment or assault in a story unless the victim is female. Sorry, boys, I guess they think you're just supposed to enjoy it.
The 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Really Really Love You is available exclusively for streaming from Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime, with no physical media to speak of. The manga by Rikito Nakamura is available from Ghost Ship.
It’s fair to say that The 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Really Really Love You gets off to a pretty strong start. It’s also fair to say that it hits diminishing returns as early as episode 3 before dropping off and going steeply downhill, never recovering until it ends on the worst note imaginable... A seriously bad decision was made, and then that bad decision positions itself to be a major player in the upcoming sequel season. From episode three to episode twelve, I think I laughed maybe three times, either rolling my eyes as the series constantly fell victim to the tropes and cliches that any good parody would be making fun of, or just sitting there staring slack-jawed and in disbelief as I witnessed it’s each and every obvious mistake. Fucking School Days did a better job parodying the harem genre than this anime. I might have felt some good will towards it based solely on the quality of the visuals, but some anime just wind up being worse than the sum of their parts.
I give The 100 Girlfriends Who Really Really Really Really Love You a 2/10.
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