The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me!

If a girl teases you, that means she likes you. Unfortunately, Akiteru knows from experience that isn't the case. Because every girl he interacts with shows him nothing but scorn, and he's not scored a single date from it. Luckily, he's more concerned with securing a spot for him and his game-development buddies at his uncle's business. But when his uncle throws him a condition that involves playing the part of his daughter's boyfriend, Akiteru has no choice but to take it. His best friend's sister Iroha, bullies him relentlessly, but doesn't seem too pleased by the news.

My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! is based on the light novel series by writer Ghost Mikawa and illustrator tomari. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

I was never going to be on board for My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me!. I mean, just read that title. Even just from that, you can plainly see that it's both an imouto fetish series and a bullying fetish series. You might be thinking, “Wait, wouldn't those conflict? Imouto fetish shows are all about fawning devotion, and bullying fetish shows are about how it would be great if a hot mean girl were into you.” You are correct! The result is a character who, much like a real sister, invades the protagonist's space and annoys him relentlessly, while also sexually harassing him.

It's just. It's a porn concept. It's the kind of story that only exists as jack-off material because there's no way to make it work as something with characters who act like people or plot beats that make sense. I say this not as a judgment, we all get off in our own ways, but merely as part of my critical evaluation. There's no way for this to be good if it's not something that gets your pants dancing, if you know what I mean.

But did it really have to be actively bad? I knew I was in for some pain when Akiteru walked into his room to find Iroha blaring and singing along with imouto-themed rap. The dialogue is outright agonizing in that special way where you can tell whoever penned it thought they were being really witty but were really reiterating cliches. Every time Aki referred to living his life efficiently, every time Iroha threw herself at him while also screeching about being his little sister, every time he gormlessly wondered why she tormented him, I wanted to throw them out a window. Or myself. The animation is hideously glowy and barely moves. By the end of the opening, I was ready to offer to pay for the singer's voice lessons.

And all of that was only in the first half of the episode, because My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! found a way to feel a million years long and overstuffed at the same time. I goggled in horror as Akiteru's uncle hit on a waitress, then professed his plan to keep doing it until she agreed to a date. I buried my face in my hands when Akiteru walked into the bathroom to find a girl sitting on the toilet. When she turned out to be his cousin, whom he had to fake-date as a condition for employment at his uncle's entertainment conglomerate, I was sure I had been cursed to have every minute feel like five thousand years. When she started spouting tsundere cliches in a breathy voice, I was ready to enter a convent.

It's too much. It's too awful. Every single dimension is incompetently executed, and it attempts to do too many things. You can't have an imouto fetish AND a bullying fetish AND a tsundere AND fake dating. It's just trash piled on top of trash piled on top of trash.

Now here is a textbook example of how an anime can take the most basic genre principles that you can imagine and still royally screw them up, somehow. It's never a great sign when a romantic comedy has a character opining about the false nature of well-worn cliches, since that was a horse corpse that has been well and truly flogged since Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan spent an entire movie trying to prove that it is, in fact, quite impossible for heterosexual men and women to be friends. Here, our guy Akiteru is convinced that the old truism about boys and girls being mean to the person they have a crush on is complete bunk, and wouldn't you know it? His friend's little sister—wait for it—is out to get him with her mischievous behavior and constant teasing. This couldn't possibly mean that she's actually in love with Akiteru? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight?

Look, there's nothing wrong with having some playful friction define the relationship between your leads in a rom-com, especially at first. There's a reason that millions of love stories that have been passed down from time immemorial have made a point to establish that The Girl™ totally thought that The Boy™ was a real jerk, at first…until they really started to understand each other. It's a simple, satisfying, and easily replicable formula. At least, you'd think so, until Akiteru blusters into his room and begins “bantering” with Iroha, which is when you realize, “Oh no, he's an idiot.”

That isn't to say that Iroha herself is winning any Waifu of the Year awards anytime soon. She's as stock-standard a love interest as they come, with her only standout personality trait being that she is genuinely so much more annoying and over-the-top than any of the tsundere and Teasing Masters that have preceded her. The problem isn't that she gives Akiteru a hard time; it's that Iroha doesn't convincingly represent the behaviors of any human being that has ever walked this earth. She's all shtick and no substance.

Given that My Friend's Little Sister is Out to Get Me is a cartoon, though, Iroha's psychotic behavior doesn't necessarily have to be a death blow to the series' prospects. The problem is Akiteru, who is so moronically oblivious to Iroha's desperately horny pretend-teasing that it is impossible to accept him as a functional human being, let alone a protagonist of a romance anime. I don't need the guy to fall head-over-heels for Iroha from minute one, nor do I need him to be some amped-up, distaff counterpart to Iroha's freaky personality. I'm just saying that the tension and fun of a romantic comedy is somewhat dulled when the very first scene of the very first episode of the show very clearly establishes that our leading lady is just pathetically down bad for an empty potato-sack of a human being who wouldn't recognize that he was being hit on even if he was in the middle of active, enthusiastic, and penetrative intercourse. Iroha could be screaming, “Please, yes, this is everything I've ever needed, give me more!”, and Akiteru would probably scoff and snark something about women being inscrutable mysteries under his breath.

All of this, and we haven't even gotten to the scene where Akiteru inadvertently sneaks a peek at his cousin popping a squat on the toilet. Very classy. Also, I have nowhere else in the preview to put this comment, but I have to say something about the one cheesecake shot of Iroha in her orange bikini from the show's opening, because it is legitimately horrifying. In their attempt to shade the contours of this teenage anime girl's stomach and vagina bones, the show just produced a hideous, gender-swapped recreation of The Incredible Melting Man. Pure nightmare fuel.

Well, I think we found the first premiere of the season that legitimately pissed me off. Don't you love it when a show points out the absurdity of a trope multiple times while also making it very obvious it's just going to beat that trope to death through its entire run? Yes, the idea of a girl bullying their crush can be outdated and unrealistic, so please continue to tell your story about how two girls are going to bully our protagonist while secretly harboring feelings for him. While we're at it, let's throw in a really questionable and moral issue with a growing teenage boy acting as the fake boyfriend of his daughter, just for the sake of blackmailing him with his dream job.

Seriously, I don't mean to be a stickler, but there was barely anything in this episode that left me feeling happy or excited. I think I genuinely hate Iroha because her overly confident and teasing disposition just isn't appealing to me. I don't want to see characters like that succeed; I want characters like that to get humbled. All her actions were genuinely disrespectful to the point where I would be seriously pissed off if anybody like this were in my life. She almost ruins a job opportunity for Akiteru and kind of humiliates him in front of his entire class by claiming to be a couple in a way that can't really be perceived as a joke. I'm sure her arc in this show is that, once a genuine romantic rival gets introduced, then she realizes that she needs to lock in to fight for something that she was probably seeing as a guaranteed relationship when she feels ready for it. However, not only do I not want her to be happy unless she goes through a massive character overhaul, but I just really don't see that being pulled off satisfyingly.

The only interesting aspect of this episode is that our protagonist is a game designer and aspires to work at a game company as a high school student. The fact that he and his team apparently sold millions of copies is cool. Most of the development team being a mystery is a little unusual, but it's not that uncommon, even if the show does a poor job of hiding who these people are from the audience in this first episode alone. I would much rather see that angle of the show get more exposure, and maybe it will; however, if it's going to be tied to a forced love triangle, then I'm not sure it's worth it. I will give the show one more chance, but it's gonna need to do a lot to win this uphill battle.