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.

It wasn't until I sat down and started to write this that I realized what My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! really is—and rethought my feelings on the anime. I mean, it's obviously extreme fetish bait for those of you who like being teased and bullied by attractive women. And it's similarly easy to see the core of the humor—that Akiteru sees the whole “being mean to the person you like” thing as stupid, unrealistic, and counterproductive. He's basically wrong-genre savvy—he would be correct in his proclamations if this were a story grounded in actual reality rather than a pervy rom-com anime.

This show is at its heart a battle between two character archetypes who embody the “being mean to the person you like” trope: the up-and-coming “mesugaki” and the reigning champion “tsundere.” The former is the titular “friend's little sister,” Iroha. She invades Akiteru's room daily and does things to specifically annoy him while always having a strong sexual undertone to her actions. The latter is Mashiro, whose self-defense mechanism is to belittle people—especially those whom she actually cares for, as they could potentially hurt her greatly if they got too close.

In general, I like the idea of battling archetypes. I find it not only creative but also respect it as well. However, that doesn't mean I particularly enjoyed this specific half-hour of TV. A lot of it has to do with the fact that neither mesugaki nor tsundere is my fetish of choice. I, like Akiteru, much prefer people who are actually nice to each other—both in my real life and in the fiction I partake in. Since that major aspect of the anime didn't hit, I'm not the target audience.

That said, I am interested to see where the show goes next week. Now that we've introduced the mesugaki and the tsundere, I'm excited to see their first meeting and how their introduction to each other causes them to act going forward—not only toward Akiteru but toward each other as well. Will I be watching this in the long run? Almost certainly not. But if mesugaki and tsundere are your thing, I have a feeling you'll be all-in on this one.

Last week, I went on at length about how I like the idea of an anime centered around a battle between the classic tsundere archetype and the up-and-coming mesugaki archetype. I think that could carry a show for a season without issue—so why did this series decide to rip off Saekano to use as its framework instead of doing something more original?

Saekano, for those not familiar, is a school-based rom-com about a group of high schoolers making a video game. Of course, one of these high schoolers is secretly a doujin artist while another is secretly a popular writer. Over time, the group gains a voice actress and a composer as well—all of whom have at least some romantic interest in the main character.

Now, of course, shows take from more popular shows all the time. But by taking so much from something as unique as Saekano means that this anime is doomed to forever be compared to it. And honestly, it's clear from even the most minuscule glance that My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! is the inferior one of the two.

Yet, the Saekano aspect wasn't even the thing that annoyed me the most: it was the school's literal dungeon. At first, I thought we were seeing a visual metaphor—that going to Kageishi's counseling room was akin to walking willingly into a medieval torture chamber. But no, this is a room that literally exists in the school—we see Kageishi and Akiteru interact with the torture devices within. To say this shatters the suspension of disbelief would be an understatement. It obliterates it and then takes the tiny little pieces and puts them in an incinerator for good measure. Frankly, My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! has thrown out any goodwill I had towards it. The only thing it made me want to do was give Saekano a rewatch—especially since I don't think I ever saw the movie.

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.

Sometimes you write a review because you're excited to talk about a series and have interesting insights. Sometimes you write a review because even if you don't have strong feelings, you need the cash. Sometimes you write a review because if you didn't, it would mean you subjected yourself to 25 minutes of pain for no reason at all, an idea which you cannot abide. This review is written from the latter perspective; while I'm very tired, I already sat through the second episode of My Friend's Little Sister Has It In for Me! and I might lose my mind if it was all for naught.

My grasp on reality, already tenuous thanks to the grueling slog of preview guide in a mediocre season, started to slip away when Aki and Ozu started discussing how Aki's situation was just like a romcom manga. Wow! How meta! How self-aware! The madness further threatened to slip in when their teacher asked Aki to come meet with her, and once the two of them were in an actual torture dungeon, she collapsed in apology for not getting the art for their game done on time. Yep, she's another member of the studio, because this is the kind of show where the world collapses around the protagonist as the single most important person in the universe. Everything revolves around Aki and his supermassive black hole of a personality.

Not that all the girls want to jump his dull bones – he's decidedly not the teacher's type. He's too old! She's drawing for him because he's blackmailing her after stumbling on her booth at a comic market where she was selling shotacon art. The pedophile teacher gag isn't any funnier when it's about an adult woman who is sexually attracted to young boys than when it's the other way around.

But even outside of the matters of personal taste, the show just doesn't work structurally. The three plotlines of Iroha's aggressive flirtation, Mashiro's fake dating, and the game development group don't mesh well. Instead of a cohesive plot where one event flows organically into the next, the story stutters from one unsatisfying vignette that would be better suited for porn to another. Aki isn't the protagonist of one series; he's the star of three separate, equally crappy anime, none of which I want to watch.

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.

I didn't think there was a way that the show could make me more annoyed, but it's somehow found a way. The painfully self-aware dialogue at the beginning of the episode just further highlights the problem that I had during the premiere. I get it, you are aware of a lot of the tropes that you would find in a typical romantic comedy, but you gotta do something more with them then just point them out. Yes, I know the main character is a typical ignorant protagonist—it would be funny if you subverted that or did something creative with it instead of just playing it completely straight. In fact, the characterization of our main lead isn't even that consistent based on the prank that was pulled at the end of the episode. How exactly was mister practical and insightful able to fall for such an obvious trick where he embarrassed himself in front of everybody wearing a dog collar?

Genuinely the only thing that I found entertaining about this episode was the situation with the teacher. The joke was incredibly obvious, but at least they leaned into it hard to an absurd degree. It's one thing that the ice queen teacher is secretly a big sub who has to serve the main character because he's blackmailing her, but it was funny because the conversation was held in the guidance counselors office, which apparently is one big sex dungeon underneath the school. The show never explains that and that's part of what made it funny. I could have done without the information about her being a pedophile but aside from that, I was briefly amused.

Even if you wanna argue that she's not really a pedophile and that her comment was just a joke, it doesn't come off as one because she's dead serious when she says it. The show isn't funny outside of when it's being absurd to an almost uncomfortable degree and everyone's actions are uncomfortable on some fundamental level. So when the show tries to have anything even remotely close to an emotionally dramatic beat, it just doesn't work because that's not the show that I'm watching. It almost feels like I'm watching Family Guy, where we get really random, unconnected “funny” bits and then the show will randomly try to have a message or some kind at the end. When the protagonist was addressing Mashiro behind the door because of her trauma, I'm not sure why I was supposed to care. Would you believe me if I said I would rather watch more Family Guy than more of this show at this point?