The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten, or, as many people know it, Angel Next Door, is one of the most divisive romance anime I have seen in a while. Angel Next Door has a very high average score, and tremendous popularity on Anilist. Why then, do all of its reviews give it such low ratings?
I’ll just come out with the answer. It boils down to three major issues:
- Regressive/problematic relationship standards
- Lack of chemistry between the leads
- Poorly written (with very obvious wish fulfillment) narrative
I’ll explain these specific details in more detail down below, but I would like this to be a review, not a hit piece. As such, let’s start from the beginning.
The premise of The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten is basically just the title. Amane, our dark-haired, dark-eyed, somewhat gloomy protagonist, encounters the light-haired, light-eyed “class idol”, Mahiru, in a park during a rainstorm. She’s sitting on a swing, and appears to be crying. He gives her his umbrella and walks home without one.
Naturally, this single act of politeness causes her to fall madly in love with him. It turns out (here’s where the title comes in!!) that the two had been living next door to each other for at least a full semester. In “repayment” for him giving her the umbrella, she deep-cleans his apartment, and decides to start cooking for him daily.
As an aside: I don’t believe anyone engaging with this show has any misapprehensions about it not being a wish fulfillment show. Angel Next Door is very clearly a romance that attempts to cater to the basest desires of teenage boys and young men by painting a fairytale of a romance with a “perfect girl” who exists entirely to cater to the male lead’s desires. This much is obvious. Of course, this doesn’t entirely prevent Angel Next Door from achieving great things, but it does make it very clear exactly what the show wants to accomplish (and what it doesn’t).
With that said, Angel Next Door struggles quite heavily with making its narrative anything BUT wish-fulfillment. Mahiru’s motivations for getting close to Amane are left vague intentionally, and this is lampshaded by her threatening to withhold her cooking from him if he continues to ask her. One is led to assume from this interaction that she must have been interested in him before the anime starts, but the script insists that their first real interaction was at the park. This implies that she became romantically interested in him (and cooks and cleans for him on a daily basis!) because he gave her his umbrella. The narrative never bothers to provide a deeper foundation or explore her interest in him in any more detail.
The narrative from this point on is pretty standard. We see our titular Angel Next Door spoiling Amane rotten (get it!!! That’s the title!!!!). Now that she cooks for him every day, they also basically spend their evenings together. The remaining 11 episodes of the series follow through on typical romcom tropes: A christmas party, indirect kisses, a fever, the guy crashing out because a girl he’s not dating but is somewhat close with isn't wearing her stockings to school and other people might see her le--wait... What?
This jarring transition brings me to discussion of one of the bigger problems within the show. The narrative doesn’t have a tremendous amount of complexity outside of the romance tropes it executes on, so it relies quite heavily on the chemistry between the characters and the ways that they interact to keep the audience engaged. Unfortunately, the ways it does this are extremely regressive. On a very casual skim, it was shocking (and a little bit weird) just how many times Mahiru was referred to as a “wife in training” or “Amane’s wife.”
This is somewhat par for the course for a domestic fantasy such as this, but it does add to a list of weird behaviors that only grows as the anime progresses. These range from dated to outright creepy:
Making light of domestic violence
Implying that a woman is at fault for putting herself in a situation where a man “could” assault her: 
Questioning a man’s “manhood” for not making sexual advances on a woman when they are alone together: 
Amane crashing out over Mahiru’s legs (with plenty of voyeuristic shots of her legs, just in case you thought this anime wouldn’t do that): 
A recurring theme is Mahiru “tempting” Amane (by simply existing near him), and him repeatedly having to “heroically resist” the temptation to not SA her / make unprompted sexual advances on her. This replaces typical romance attraction, where the MC is typically flustered by the heroine’s coquettish behavior. In Angel Next Door, we instead see Amane having to physically restrain himself from kissing/touching/groping Mahiru when she makes not even flirtatious comments, but simply comments that imply she’s comfortable around him. The funniest part is that he keeps telling her that she shouldn’t be comfortable around him for this exact reason. There’s a nugget of truth to how relationships work in this dynamic: It’s true that in a lot of relationships, both parties are afraid of crossing unspoken boundaries, or taking actions for fear of a lack of reciprocation. Unfortunately, Angel Next Door repeatedly reinforces the idea that men must constantly resist urges to pounce on women, who in turn are “creatures of temptation” and entirely responsible if a man feels too tempted by them to resist his own urges. Amane is continually portrayed as “a very nice guy” for not constantly leering at Mahiru, or continually making the choice to not SA her when he gets the urge to do so.
Obviously, this is a regressive viewpoint on gender that is harmful to both men and women, and the sheer number of times that it is repeated within Angel Next Door is tragic and disappointing. To add on to this, Mahiru’s character plays quite heavily into the “Yamato Nadeshiko” beauty standard, which is an outdated and misogynist “feminine ideal” that focuses heavily on purity, modesty, nurturing behavior, and deference to one’s husband. Rather than interrogating these tropes, as even anime from 2006 were doing, Angel Next Door embraces it wholeheartedly. A very large portion of her perceived “value” to Amane comes from these outdated gender dynamics: She cooks, cleans, and acts as an emotional sink for him, without expecting much in return.
Unfortunately, these regressive gender stereotypes aren’t the only troubles plaguing Angel Next Door. It also struggles quite heavily to portray a healthy relationship in any meaningful way, or to develop its characters to any extent.
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The chemistry between our leads is very shallow. We don’t see our couple sharing many issues with each other, or supporting each other in life (or really any of the actual relationship activities that make love/friendship blossom) in this series. The characters spend most of their time in Amane’s apartment, and almost all of their interactions are simply surface-level flirtation without any real depth or meaning. We do see each of our protagonists sharing some of their background “trauma” with each other, but they don’t really work through it, or share perspectives, or even really find solutions. Instead, the mere act of sharing is portrayed as the panacea to these troubles, and they quickly move on. Furthermore, all of the characters within Angel Next Door are quite one-note, and few really develop throughout the series.
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The two cases of development that are supposed to happen are with our main characters. Mahiru is supposed to become more comfortable at school, and stop trying to be perfect / hiding her real personality so much. However, we don’t really spend much time at school in the first place, and despite the anime taking place over the course of several months, we don’t get to see any changes in her behavior at school. The second case of character development is supposed to happen with Amane. Instead of being introverted, the audience is expected to see him become more self-confident, and be more assertive. We don’t really get to see this either, for the same reasons above.
Such a large majority of time is spent in Amane’s apartment, moving between his dinner table and his couch, that it almost feels suffocating. Amane and Mahiru’s interactions with classmates outside of their three friends are almost entirely non-existent, which really prevents much development or depth from being added to their characters.
There are three side characters in the show, and they’re all quite one-note. Itsuki Akazawa, Amane’s closest friend at school, is handsome and honest. The closest thing to characterization we get is when he talks about a fight he had with his dad (which may indicate he has ideals he’d like to stand up for, but we don’t really get to see this in action). His girlfriend, Chitose Shirakawa, does at least get some notable character traits. She’s bubbly and energetic, and she enjoys teasing her friends. This, of course, isn’t much, but it’s a more meaningful character trait than any other character in the show. Yuuta Kadowaki, the third side character in the show, is handsome and honest, which makes it somewhat difficult to distinguish him from Itsuki. See if you can spot the difference in the picture below:
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This, of course, brings me to discussion of the character designs. Every single character design in this show feels lifeless. There are hundreds of anime that utilize their character designs to give the audience a peek into what their characters might be like, or use them to accentuate key features in a manner that allows the audience to connect with each character in a unique way. Angel Next Door, on the other hand, draws its characters to be vanilla and blandly attractive to the audience. As I’m sure one could tell from the screenshots I’ve included above, there is very little that is unique about Angel Next Door’s character designs. You’d think that in a show with only five important characters, an author would have the time to workshop character designs that let each one’s unique attributes shine. It doesn't feel like this happened here, however. The one compliment that I can give to Angel Next Door’s characters is that they aren’t ugly designs, or particularly hard to look at; the problem is that they accomplish this by being so unfathomably bland that it’s difficult to feel anything looking at them.
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Despite the characters being difficult to distinguish through their writing or their character designs, their voice actors pick up a surprising amount of slack. Both Mahiru and Chitose’s voice actors are able to give life to their characters in a way that no other element of the story is able to. Of particular note is Manaka Iwami, Mahiru’s voice actor. She does a good job portraying Mahiru becoming more comfortable around Amane as the series progresses, which ends up becoming one of the best aspects of the series. Haruka Shiraishi also does a good job bringing Chitose’s character to life. Even though she doesn’t have much of a character to build upon, she is able to grab the audience’s attention and endear them to the character far more than the actual writing or direction was able to. Unfortunately, I don’t have much good to say about the men who voice acted in this series. I’m very reluctant to blame this on their talent or capabilities, however, considering just how little they had to go on. All of the male characters in this show end up being quite bland, which I can imagine makes any real imagination or innovation within their bounds extremely difficult for their voice actors.
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The direction of Angel Next Door is extremely disappointing. It is, of course, difficult to imagine what a well-directed romance/slice of life series looks like, but it is extremely easy to understand that it would not look like Angel Next Door. Every shot, every composition, and every angle feels entirely uninspired, and rarely serves to draw attention to anything except a female character’s thighs, chest, or face. Of particular atrocity is the scene where Mahiru decides to not wear stockings to school (which becomes a major plot point, because of course it does.) The audience, during this scene of mostly dialogue, is left staring at Mahiru’s bare thighs for an unbearably long duration, making it painfully clear just where the director’s priorities lie. As I mentioned in the very beginning of this review, Angel Next Door is a wish-fulfillment show down to its very core. Perhaps I’m the fool for expecting anything else.
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The plot in Angel Next Door, as discussed above, is quite milquetoast. Each episode is more or less the same formula: Amane compliments Mahiru’s domestic abilities, she reacts in a cute way, Amane has to physically restrain himself from pouncing on her (and instead does something like pat her head or call her cute), she reacts by getting all flustered, and he has to physically restrain himself from pouncing on her again. As I’ve mentioned earlier in this review, this is obviously a very harmful portrayal of the “ideal relationship”, and is very disturbingly prudish. So much of the focus of the story and the couple’s dynamic is on the physical “temptations” that Amane feels. Characters rarely talk about anything interesting, or even have entertaining back and forths. Instead, the dialogue entirely focuses on the relationship between Amane and Mahiru. Even in this dialogue, very little of value is gained. One could watch the show without subtitles, and even without understanding Japanese, their experience would be very similar (and perhaps better, when you consider how stilted some of the writing is.)
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Angel Next Door is a slice of life show. With that understanding, there’s not much to be expected of the animation. Somehow, Angel Next Door still underdelivers. In a stagnant setting with bland character designs, even the animation manages to feel like budget cut after budget cut. The most motion we see in a cut is a character walking from one end of the room to the other, and there is very little emotion in any of the animation we experience. Since Angel Next Door is a slice of life, it’s not as if this is a particularly heavy knock against the show, but it is still disappointing.
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The soundtrack in Angel Next Door is quite forgettable (I forgot to include this section until I was editing this review!). I will say that it didn’t actively clash with the tone of the show, and it wasn’t offensive or annoying. With this said, I don’t recall any moments that it amplified any emotional beats (not that there were many to begin with, unfortunately).
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While I’ve said a lot of very harsh things about this show, I would like to end on this note: as bland and milquetoast as Angel Next Door is, and as regressive as the gender roles it promotes are, there are also shows that are much worse. Little of the screen time is spent as an assault on the audience’s senses, and there are plenty of other shows that have just as bad if not worse messaging around gender roles. This is all to say that as boring as Angel Next Door is, it could always be worse.
TL;DR:
Angel Next Door is, overall, a wish-fulfillment romance anime that relies heavily on its audience’s infatuation with its female lead to drive their engagement. If you’re in the mood for a domestic fantasy with no narrative or thematic ambitions, and you’re able to stomach misogynist stereotypes and regressive gender norms (or if you prefer them), Angel Next Door may be the anime for you. If, however, you like shows that actually aim high, and try to accomplish something valuable in the time that you give them, there are dozens of better romance anime (that aren’t problematic!) that I would gladly recommend to you. Makeine would be a great start.
I give The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten a 4/10.