Realistically, given the kind of anime made today, there’s a serious conversation to be had if a show like this is even necessary. With its subsequent sublimation into light novel metatext, whether it be through a meta-otaku high school romcom type thing, or heaven forbid, an isekai light novel; the harem genre has become more of an ingredient in a greater dish, or an obnoxious object to be shoehorned into something currently publishing, rather than the main course of a narrative on its own. It’s particularly interesting to see the slow and innocuous demise of the shonen harem manga. Especially in a post-Quintuplets world, I think it’s hard for a lot of mangaka to imagine tackling the genre as sharply or as elegantly without simply falling into pastiche (which has already happened to minimal success). You still have your occasional bread and butter ecchi harem romcom, sure. But with Shonen Jump’s recently contracted allergy to harem stories, in the hopes of not alienating their 50% female readership, there are slimmer and slimmer harem pickings every year. However, Dealing With the Mikadono Sisters is a Breeze proves once again that a rudimentary understanding of basic human psychology can open up the opportunity for a shonen harem manga to resonate with millions across the world once again.

To quickly pitch, Mikadono Sanshimai wa Angai, Choroi, is about a kid named Yuu Ayase who was the son of a now deceased famous actress Subaru Ayase. Thankfully, the wealthy Mr. Mikadono, a friend and patron of Yuu’s mother, becomes the kid’s legal guardian and helps him enroll in the prestigious Saika Academy. Yuu, despite being naturally attractive, pretty much sucks at everything and isn’t terribly athletic. However, because his mother was fairly neglectful, the subsequent parentification led Yuu to develop a general aptitude towards cooking and cleaning. So, in very harem manga-esque development, Yuu is requested by the Mikadono patriarch to be the support of his three prodigious daughters, for they also do not have a mother. In turn, Yuu becomes determined to build a strong family with the girls, and in doing so, ends up rizzing all of them and harem hijinks ensue.

I’ve opined in past reviews about shoehorning in a harem as a trope versus focusing on harem as its own narrative device. Foundationally, this is likely due to the influence of manga editors contorting their author’s narratives into something that injects artificial tension without any substantial consequences. And I understand, as much as anyone else, that harem is an inherently dissonant and contrived kind of story structure. On its face, that you could have a scenario of multiple women all interested in the same man, and for none of those women to properly act upon their feelings, while somehow all of them being teenagers, doesn’t make any sense. Ironically, High School DxD’s juvenile, frat-esque approach with actual polygamy is somehow more realistic to me. However, harem being treated as it is still pisses me off. I can smell the pandering a mile away, and frankly, it reeks of cowardice. It’s the same hokey and hackneyed narrative crutches you’d get with a love triangle except the mc can collect women like Pokemon. The only reason a harem exists in a show like My Dress Up Darling, when the main characters are five inches away from boning every other episode (and that isn’t a metaphor or an exaggeration), is to make Gojo look good in a mutually gendered power fantasy kind of way, like Bisque Doll likes to do. Dealing With the Mikadono Sisters is a Breeze, on the other hand, is honest with what it wants to do—and its honesty is one of the series’ greatest strengths.

Mikadono understands first and foremost that it is a shonen harem manga, and it respects that. It’s not trying to hide its structure under layers of pretentious irony like in Makeine or is trying to be something else entirely with a harem in it because “anime,” like in every isekai light novel. There are no gimmicks like in an ecchi harem comedy, it’s a tried and true, bread-and-butter, shonen harem romcom that relies upon its strong characterization to keep audiences coming back week after week. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel but fails, it instead feels like the first real successor to The Quintessential Quintuplets we’ve seen this decade. There’s a boy, there’s some girls, they’re in this ridiculous ass scenario, but it’s good this time, and you’re never truly sure who is going to win. Quintuplets played this game where you were never supposed to really know who was going to become Futaro’s wife, so theoretically, any girl could win. And ideally, even if you picked your team and were ready to go to war for her, the author did well to build up multiple acceptable answers to its starting mystery. Now, many contend with Go-toubun’s ending in how it failed to do this by the time the series reached its final few volumes, but a serious, semi-successful attempt was made. Mikadono Sisters in response, reduces the number of girls, but in doing so, can make an even stronger case per girl.

One of my biggest contentions with the harem genre in basically any of its iterations is that 99% of the time it’s incredibly obvious which girl is going to win. You can even go back to Love Hina or I’’s or some shit, and there’s always “the main girl” and some other bitch who ends up becoming the silver medalist. This is likely a product of the mangaka not thinking far enough ahead as to how they are supposed to balance all of these disparate personalities and relationships, especially wherein you could realistically see this cardboard cutout of a main character end up with any of the girls. What’s even more unfortunate is that there is always a moment where the girls properly relent the mc by saying something emotionally meaningful, especially for the first few drop offs, the series sort of just gives up. Like this chick with the glasses and the boobs can still be there for fan service but she won’t develop or have an interesting internal world outside of the mc for the foreseeable 80 chapters. Mikadono Sisters is the kind of series where it’s actually worth your time trying to theorize who’s going to win the harem. Each girl has their own argument, but even relying upon genre convention isn’t enough, for there isn’t some kind of “queen” of the harem. And this is exciting; I want to feel any kind of remote tension at all for who is going to win.

Furthermore, the girls themselves are also strong characters for this kind of scenario. I’ve seen the comments joking about how all the girls are some shade of tomboy, which is true, but others have noted that they’re all kind of tsunderes. The Mikadono sisters are fun in that even if you could similarly label them, it only serves to highlight the nuances in how different they are. By the end of the season, we’ve somewhat established the unique dynamic Yuu has with each individual girl, and how their specific gender expressions affect them.

Dealing with the Mikadono Sisters is a Breeze has a lot of interesting angles to explore gender dynamics in its narrative. In academia they like to use the term “gender play” to broadly describe the process in which gender conventions are messed with or manipulated in ways that are harmless. Kazuki is an explicitly gender non-confirming character who becomes boxed into her role as a princely girl. In a typical harem narrative, the mc would help Kazuki discover how she needs a man in her life, and allows her to live as her “true self,” a feminine woman. However, Mikadono Sisters takes a much more nuanced approach. Kazuki does, and will continue to, engage in several dilemmas due to the unique expression of her gender identity, but she will likely not give up her role entirely; Kazuki likes being a boyish girl and has since she was young. Even so, she is still a woman, and through Yuu, is looking for ways for her to feel pampered and wanted. This manifests in her being interested in Yuu occasionally taking on more masculine roles, but she also wants to protect him and take a more measured, assertive position in their relationship. There’s seemingly this undercurrent of her really liking to dote on Yuu, like the fact that he’s so pathetic makes taking care of him kind of hot? Even if most of the time, he will be taking care of her, it's a whole thing. And it’s not just this one girl, all of them are kind of like this or have their own particular thing.

What Aya Hirakawa has done is lampshade the gendered undertones in a lot of harem stories (in that the women really don’t need the man to make a living, instead for emotional support) and made that dynamic the basis of the story. It’s why I think all the girls are a bit boyish in the first place. In addition, Aya being a woman allows for Yuu to be a protagonist that can exist beyond being a surrogate for a presumably male audience and appeal to a potential female demographic. Because, even if Anilist doesn’t necessarily reflect it, Mikadono Sisters has been quite popular this season. I’ve consistently seen this show’s latter episodes in the upper ends of those online anime magazine episodic ranking polls every week, even ones that lean toward women. And I think it’s because Yuu’s more sensitive earnestness, and home ec skills, are aspects that appeal to a lot of women in the modern world. It’s the main reason (outside of well written female characters), I believe Mikadono Sisters could reportedly sell 1.5 million copies before an anime adaptation even aired, something that’s kind of an anomaly for a harem series these days. We’re probably never getting Quintuplets numbers ever again, that was a statistical fluke. But the evidence has shown itself that even heavily male dominated genres can find a broader audience if they can just walk off their bullshit for like thirty seconds.

Speaking of, for those that are curious, this is not an ecchi harem comedy. In fact, there’s a flabbergasting lack of fanservice in this show, but that’s more a reflection of the mangaka’s style than anything else. I’m not opposed to fanservice, but what we have balances the more wholesome tone Mikadono attempts much more coherently.

Additionally, the visuals in Mikadono Sisters are very solid. PA Works is unique in that they’re one of the few anime studios wherein their shows are more of a studio effort than the vision of a small set of artists and their team of independent contractors. And PA Works shows, in fact, look good—this show is no exception. There are the typical short cuts you’re likely to find in a tv production like this, but nothing we’re not used to at this point, and the show seems like it tries to avoid it when possible. Arguably the biggest complaint I have regarding the visuals is that there is no substantial sakuga or serious directorial experimentation. Now, this is a harem manga, so I’m honestly not sure why you would be expecting crazy visuals. And I will say there was an episode or two with some neat storyboards, but nothing crazy. Either way, you won’t be seeing a production mired in bad compositing or off-putting character art. Hell, I dropped the Quintuplets anime because the visuals were invariably bland (outside of the shaft animated bits I’ve seen online), and this show is heads above that if that says anything.

I could levy more complaints. But honestly, they would be the same complaints I’d give to about 99% of any harem manga. Like, it would be cooler if there was more physical intimacy between the mc and all the girls, but that would inevitably cause conflict in such a way as to end the harem scenario. So, no matter what I do, I will likely never find my perfect harem show, but that’s honestly fine. I can respect the terms the show is guiding itself under as long as it doesn’t suck, and Mikadono Sisters is good, so it’s fine.

Not to overly praise it but, Dealing With the Mikadono Sisters is a Breeze is easily the best harem anime of the decade. Now, this isn’t hard to do at all when the genre has been tokenized to irrelevance, but good art should be recognized for the value is does, in fact, provide. Interestingly enough, Mikadono Sisters is a work that well inspires me to make art in my personal life. The pathology of the main characters is so tactile, so strongly present, that other characters with similar neurosis seem fun to write. Each of the Mikadono sisters have daddy issues, some even have mommy issues, and their struggles are presented in a way as to be clear but not nauseatingly trite or overwhelming. I can admit that this, of the 15 shows I’m trying to watch this season, was the show I was the most excited to come back to—and every time I came back, I was always well engaged. Something about this show is infectious, and I frankly can’t wait for it to hopefully come back for more content.

Who knows where this adaptation will go necessarily? We’re 150+ chapters into the source, and only now does it seem like the story might wrap up by like volume 22 or something, when 16 is just now releasing. Even Quintuplets, one of the most successful manga ever made, has struggled with one of the most regret ridden, schizophrenic adaptations I’ve ever seen. It was clear the production committee only planned up to the movie, and because of that, spent the last three years backpedaling that as hard as they could. And if THAT couldn’t get a well-adjusted adaptation, I doubt this can either. Whatever it may be, I’m happy I was able to catch this show when I could, and I’m looking forward to whatever bizarre creative output comes from me because of it. If the length of this review doesn’t tell you something, then I don’t know what will.

Have a nice day.