The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Watari-kun's ****** Is About to Collapse

Naoto Watari has had his share of struggles: his parents died two years ago, and now he and his sister live at his aunt's house. There, his desire to protect his sister earned him notoriety as "the guy with the sister complex"—which never mattered to him, as his sister always came first. But when Satsuki, a childhood friend-turned-enemy (maybe), becomes his schoolmate, Naoto's ordinary life is thrown into chaos ... and Satsuki may just be the beginning.

Watari-kun's ***** is About to Collapse is based on the manga series by Naru Narumi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

This first episode of Watari-kun's ***** is About to Collapse got a few laughs out of me. Some came from the dialogue while others come from the visuals. It has all the markings of your standard high school rom-com—except that the main character is far more than an audience proxy blank-slate. He has a lot going on in his personal life—which is doubly true once Tachibana enters the picture.

Childhood trauma is a weird thing. You're always kind of stuck in that moment—unable to get past what you thought and felt at the time. That is the issue that's tripping up Naoto. If he were to look at the situation through even his young adult viewpoint, he would see that something major must have happened to make Tachibana react that way six years ago. Even just knowing that she disappeared the day after destroying his garden makes it easy to hypothesis what happened. Perhaps she simply had to move away suddenly and, afraid that she would be forgotten, did something guaranteed to stick in Naoto's mind. And if that's what happened, she certainly succeeded.

The other issue facing Naoto is that he's lost so much and is unable to deal with even the idea of losing any more. The only thing he has left in the world is his sister and has thus become hyper-focused on her. While Suzu may play it off like he's more obsessed with her than she him, we see that even a few hours apart has her worried that she's been abandoned again. There is simply a ton of trauma circling this brother/sister pair and makes it inherently more interesting than a lot of rom-coms right off the bat.

But while I was enjoying the show for the most part, I kept coming back to one question: What is the six-letter word in the title blocked out by asterisks? In Japanese, it's only two characters long—though that means little considering how many nouns are that long and make sense plugged into that sentence. I honestly can't think of any words that can fit! Help me out in the comments before I go insane.

If there is one thing I cannot abide in a narrative, it's deliberate meanness. That, in my mind, is the damning sin of this episode. Naoto Watari's life may not be perfect before Tachibana comes stalking back into it, but it's at least on a trajectory he's relatively comfortable with. He and his sister, who were orphaned a few years ago, have finally found a place to live with an oddball aunt, he's making friends, and generally feeling like things are going in the right direction. But then his childhood nemesis transfers in and his life promptly goes to hell, because she's terrible about things like “appropriate boundaries” and “consent.”

I'll give it this, at least Tachibana is equally horrible to both boys and girls. After she assaults Naoto by forcibly kissing him (and him commenting that it's starting to “feel good” isn't consent; it's a physiological reaction), she comes to school the next day and starts groping Ishihara, a girl he's friends with. Her opening encounters with Naoto are framed as a horror narrative, with her stalking him and repeatedly calling out his name in what's somehow both obnoxious and creepy. She seems utterly devoted to destroying both his life and his peace of mind, and that's far from okay, even if the episode at times seems to want to play it for laughs.

In some ways, this feels like a throwback. Awful behavior aside, this is a bit like a harem series from the Love Hina years, where mean behavior is hand-waved aside in favor of making the girls look quirky rather than unhinged. As the episode wears on, there's a clear sense that that's what it's trying to do with Tachibana: she has a reason for the things she's doing that don't involve the state of her mental health. We don't know what that is at this point, of course, but her later actions with Suzu, Naoto's ten-year-old sister, seem to indicate that she has some sense of right and wrong and simply may not be good at expressing it. That's nowhere near enough to make up for her other actions, but I suppose it's something.

Needless to say, I did not enjoy my time with this episode. I'm not looking forward to episode two. In part the lackluster visuals are part of that – the girls' bare legs are drawn very awkwardly, especially when they're walking – but the fact that almost every single female character is obnoxious in one way or another only compounds the issues with Tachibana. If it had leaned more into the horror angle, it'd be a different story, but at this point, it's a rom-com that's too light on both rom and com for me.

Does the “******” stand for "garden?” Seriously? Look, I'm not trying to make too big of a deal outside of the expectations set by a ridiculous title, but come on. If you name an anime “Watari-kun's ***** is About to Collapse,” you are telling me that the censored word that you replaced with asterisks means something. Probably something freaky. Something deranged. Something so crude and graphic that it would even get bleeped out of the Japanese dub (unless it was an inexplicably specific reference to a copyrighted work or something, I guess). There are so many words you could slip right into the title, there, and the creators of this anime have to know the debased games of mad-libs that its viewers would be playing before the premiere even got past the opening scene. Except, now, I'm pretty sure it just stands for “garden”, because gardening is the one element of this show that stands out in any way, for any reason.

Oh, sure, the girl from the poster with the menacing-looking hoe is dang-ass freak, but in a manner that is completely unremarkable for any stupid anime rom-com. She sexually harasses men and women alike in her stalkerish efforts to resume her friendship with our main guy Watari, and she would have been arrested and sent to prison several times before the premiere ended if this show took place in a reality that wasn't composed entirely of stale anime tropes. The only thing she “collapses” at any point in this episode, though, is the garden she thrashed before peacing out of Watari's life when they were kids. She's also decimating Watari's social life, along with any prospects he has at getting a date with the not-deranged cutie from school, but the gardening material is what the show seems to be relying on to stand out from the crowd.

Does this work? Oh, no, absolutely not. I am sorry to report that a couple of scenes that reference gardening tools and whatnot are not enough to prevent Watari-kun's ***** is About to Collapse from being a total snooze-fest. This show is just fundamentally lacking in the sauce, my friends. Watari is a pathetic bore. Satsuki is a horny bore. Watari's little sister is an obnoxiously precocious bore. Purple Haired Love Interest #2 is so boring that I can't even be bothered to remember her name. The flat and lifeless animation is boring to look at. Not a single spark of energy can be mustered by any of the “comedic” scenes, since this cast shares the collective chemistry of a bag of bruised and mushy cucumbers that got forgotten in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator for too long. Don't let the stupid title fool you, everyone. This is as lame and mediocre as any anime comedy is likely to get this season.