Hananoi-kun to Koi no Yamai aka A Condition Called Love is a Shojo-Romance manga written and drawn by Morino Megumi. It was adapted into a 12-episode anime by East Fish Studio, a fairly new studio with no notable previous works.
I have not watched many Shojo anime, but the ones that I have, I have enjoyed thoroughly. This being the Shojo-Romance of Spring season, I was curious how it would compare to Winter season's A Sign of Affection.
Sure, the production quality is not up to par from the trailers, but surely the story is good right?
The story follows Hinase Houtaro, who gets asked out on a trial date by Hananoi Saki. The latter falls in love with her at first sight when she hands him an umbrella. Initially, she rejects dating him, but later accepts his offer of a trial dating. She hopes doing this will allow her to experience genuine romantic love for the first time.
The main couple sucks! The character writing and the relationship, are written in such a contrived way that any pushy scene, sprinkled with romantic sappy music gives off the illusion that the scene in question is romantic. But the reality is that it is forced, undynamic, bland, and leaves you feeling uncomfortable.
Hananoi is creepy, pushy, clingy, and often behaves like a Yandere. His girlfriend is the only thing on his mind and is rude to everyone else.
A character with bad traits IS NOT a bad writing decision. When someone writes a character with flaws, especially glaring ones. They are usually addressed or the character has an arc to grow out of them and mature.
As the anime goes on his behavior improves, and his backstory elaborates more on his characterization, but the creepy behavior is never addressed properly and is ignored by the cast for the simple reason being that he is hot.
Hinase despite being 16 years old, has the mental age of a 10-year-old. She has no idea what love is supposed to mean and is scared she will never fall in love. She lacks social awareness, is incredibly naive, and is very easily exploitable. Which Hananoi indirectly takes advantage of.
In the first episode, she loses a hair clipping, Hananoi goes out of his way to search for it for hours and almost gets frostbite. If a close friend or lover did this, it would be a romantic scene of consideration. But in episode 1, Hananoi is nothing more than an acquaintance. But Hinase does not view it as creepy or even weird. She cannot even comprehend that someone having a shrine of you, the week you start dating is weird.
Because the couple is written as they are, you can have any forced scenes imaginable. With no good chemistry and bottom-of-the-barrel writing, you have scenes like when Hananoi picks up and embraces Hinase in the first few episodes. To the viewer, it is laughably forced, but to the characters, it works because Hananoi is clingy and Hinase does not know any better.
Other than the bad romance, this anime is so boring. You have scenes like the characters staring into each other's eyes that drag on, lots of yapping about feelings, and school romance cliches with no special execution.
The production is subpar.
If some of the scenes were directed better, maybe my stance on the series would be different, but what we got is what we got.
The art style is plain, and the animation is limiting... there were several animation errors: my favorite is when you had a scene of Hinase greeting her boyfriend while wearing gloves and then in the next scene, she is not wearing any and complains how cold her hands are.
Hanazawa Kana is an amazing voice actress, but her voicing Hinase was a miscast. Such a cheerful, full-of-personality voice is inserted on an overly plain girl. I rarely if ever complain about Japanese voice acting. The OSTs are fine, but they overuse one OST whenever there is a slightly romantic scene occurs: whenever they embrace each other or exchange turd pics, you hear it all the time. The ending song is pretty nice.
A Condition Called Love is a laughably bad romance. Along with Unnamed Memory and Metalic Rogue, it is one of the worst anime of 2024.