This Week in Anime

The Column at the Corner of Romance and Comedy

Steve
I'm just happy to avoid getting stuck with the isekai column. Truck-kun won't be slaking his thirst with my blood this season.

But more to the point, I'd concur there's quite a bit of variety and intrigue in the romcom sphere this autumn. I also see that most of these shows didn't cut daily streaming reviews, so I'd encourage our audience to look into some of these more closely. You might be surprised.

It's funny, throughout the premiere, I was almost expecting some kind of Phantom Thread-esque twist. Like maybe Kiyoko was secretly orchestrating all of Yano's accidents to dote on him. Love speaks many languages, after all.

But by all accounts, everyone in this show is a good bean.

It's very deliberately paced—which is a kind way to call it slow as molasses. If you're in the right frame of mind, Yano-kun could be a nice and easygoing show to wind down with. A romcom in the comfort sense more than the comedic one.

I'd say the premise is also just stupid enough to have some real promise. Arthur grows to distrust all people because of their constant attempts to murder him, so he puts all his trust in the robot maid Marie. Who isn't a robot? And he just never bothers to check. To some extent, you have to know what you're doing to run with a plot that silly and convoluted. And sure enough, there are some decent gags in here.

While I can't say I love it, I will award it bonus points for Marie doing her best Roberta impersonation in the first episode.

Mechanical Marie also isn't even Fall's only romcom option with a heroine who has trouble wearing her emotions on her face. This may shock you, but in Inexpressive Kashiwada and Expressive Oota, Kashiwada is...how should I put this...inexpressive.

The title of the show basically tells you everything you need to know. It's cute and lighthearted, but it lacks pizzazz. And mostly, it made me think of how Teasing Master Takagi-san is a more immediately engaging take on a guy constantly hoisting his own petard in a futile attempt to impress his crush.

I can't say I mind the presentation, though. Like Yano-kun, it's not an especially stand-out production, but it has a discernible style it's aiming for, and that feels like half the battle with these adaptations nowadays.

All those noblemen should have minded their business instead of judging Melphiera's sense of whimsy and particular penchant for girl dinner.

Quality-wise, I liked it a lot! I respect the moxie of a romcom with a genderswapped Senshi Dungeon Meshi as its heroine.

To be fair, outside of the tasty-looking monster meat, it doesn't have much else in common with Delicious in Dungeon. The narrative sits firmly in the romance wheelhouse, and the odd foodstuffs are gastronomical garnish. But it's an important garnish. It turns this meet-cute into a far superior meat-cute.

Things work differently in the land of anime. But mostly I'm just happy to see more adaptations of shoujo manga that have an evident amount of love and care put into them.

It's extremely lovable. Though I should mention, for this column's theme, that it is far more rom than com. While it sprinkles humor into these characters, it's more interested in their interiority and drama. In a good way!

I was dying at the bust of Medici(?) in the background of this shot. It's on an entirely different plane of existence.

Let's Play definitely stands out, for better and for worse. Like you said, it's a webcomic adaptation, which already distinguishes it from the rest of its peers this season. True to form, the characters and story are exaggerated and cartoonish, and to be honest, I kinda dug that. It feels weird, and that's better than feeling boring.

It's a fascinating mess, and I can't lie and say I'm not curious where its absurd web of characters and coincidences will lead. Plus, I respect any heroine who turns down a date to game. Also, I'm sorry, but I really want to see the version of this story where the inciting incident is Northernlion getting frustrated by a "Sort Your Salad Simulator." It's already like 90% of the way there.

I thought this one was gonna annoy me—and it did—but it's also so ridiculous and trashy that it ended up mostly working for me. It has all the tropes. It has all the cliches. If there's a refuge in audacity, then My Friend's Little Sister is smack dab in the middle of it.

It might have the best OP of the bunch, too? It's kinetic and creative, and it's stuffed with a bunch of video game and other meme references. Which, again, would be cloying if not for the extra bit of oomph it has. And that oomph, in this case, manifests as a pair of yukkuris playing a knockoff Suika Game.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

So, jumping back to Let's Play for a moment, it is somehow both a gamer romcom and an office romcom. And it's hardly the only office romcom on the docket this fall. One of the other options is My Awkward Senpai, which continues our trend of anime titles with a real sense of mystery to them.

As a working stiff in the email mines myself, I understand the appeal of office-based courtship shenanigans. But I think this was the most forgettable of the bunch for me. The premiere just hits the same notes over and over, and the characters didn't give me much else to hang onto.

If nothing else, it's a reassurance that we haven't completely lost Crunchyroll to the corporatists. If they're amenable to airing this dreck, then there's still hope.

Otherwise, yeah, not much to say about this one other than the fact that it has nipples. If that's all you need, then godspeed.

A spiritual successor to Maebashi Witches' sharp takedown of fatphobia, Plus-Sized Misadventures branches out into very silly and very serious directions at the same time. In most cases, I would call that clumsy, but I think the jarring tonal shifts here feel bizarrely incisive. Like, Yumeko's super chipper attitude works as a meaningful contrast against the glimpses she sees of her previous self. The show doesn't shy away from mining that contrast for comedy, but it reaches rather affecting heights too. Sure, at face value, the amnesiac storyline is ridiculous. But as a literary device, it shows the audience how flimsy and superficial our societally ingrained prejudices can be. Not to mention that forgetting about the existence of social media has to be an instant 500% boost to your mental well-being.

There are some romcom adjacent titles if we really want to be thorough. Chitose Is in the Ramune Bottle certainly possesses qualities of roms and/or coms, but I neither laughed nor felt much love after I finished watching it, so I don't think we have to pry into it much further.

More positively, May I Ask for One Final Thing? has some (bad) romance and lots of (literal) punchiness, but something tells me that TWIA readers will be hearing more on that later this week, so I think we can also hold off on that one.

For now, at least as far as romcoms are concerned, the fall season is pretty darn formidable! Lots of options, and nothing I'd call offensively bad or abjectly boring. If I had to pick one, it'd be Plus-Sized Misadventures, which is currently sitting at a criminally low 2.7 rating on Crunchyroll. Not that this score means anything. It definitely doesn't reflect the actual quality of the anime. It's funny, life-affirming, and it has a murder mystery brewing in the background. What more could you ask for?