The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle

As far as normies go, it's hard to beat Chitose Saku. He's the most popular kid in his high school, has an ironclad reputation that can even weather vicious online attacks, and a group of friends who are as attractive on the outside as they are on the inside. But when a teacher asks Saku to help a student who has been shut away in his room for months reacclimate to school life, his perfect world will never be the same.

Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle is based on the light novel series by Hiromu and raemz. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Although this looks beautiful, with rich art and animation and good use of light and shadow, I am leery. Our lead is introduced leering at girls' legs and skirts. One female character is introduced, if not boobs-first, then boobs-second, with the shot of her cleavage taking up much more time than that of her face. And the boy he's supposed to be helping return to school has a streak of virulent misogyny that makes my skin crawl. Quite possibly part of Chitose's aid will be to get Kenta out of his ugly otaku stereotype mindset, but I found a lot of this episode very hard to stomach.

It also feels like perhaps it's trying to be classier or at least more erudite than your average tale of this type. Not having read the source material, I can't say if it actually is, but the impression I get from this episode is that we're in for a fairly standard story about a group of popular kids who use their popularity to help others. The episode itself is an extended thirty minutes with an extra twenty minutes devoted to two of the voice actors giving us a mini-tour of the series' setting, Fukui. I'm not sure the extra ten minutes of story content is merited, although I do understand what the goal was: to introduce us to the entire extended case of named characters in as natural a way as possible. And it does largely succeed there – there's a bit of unnatural narration about everyone's club activities, but the dynamic between the core group of five comes through clearly, as does Chitose's relationship with potential manic pixie dream girl Asuka, who I have pegged as his actual romantic interest.

The problem is that this feels very much like a prologue. There are far too many named characters, three of whom have names that start with “yu,” a major creative writing no-no, and all of them just feel like tropes in human skin. Chitose himself resents the school-wide assessment of him as a fuccboi, but he doesn't appear to want to do anything about it until his teacher sends him to figure out why Kenta's not been coming to school. If this interaction does result in meaningful change (and a friend's continued reading of the manga version suggests to me that it might), then this episode could be deceptive. But did it have to be dull as well?

As of this episode, the most interesting element of the story to me is that Asuka is reading some Golden Age of Mystery fiction, 1942's Phantom Lady by Cornell Woolrich writing as William Irish. If this deliberate name drop ends up factoring into the plot of the series, I could be grossly misjudging it. But as of right now, this feels like all style and little substance.