The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 3

Episode 29

As an editorial writer, I can absolutely sympathize with 100 Girlfriends needing to regularly find new angles with which to approach its subject matter. New perspectives are needed to make sure things consistently feel fresh, and this week, that perspective is bird's-eye. It's a very top-down angle. Yasashiki Yamane is a big girl with an all-encompassing appreciation for every one of God's creatures, and that viewpoint provides the lens through which this story of gentle giant girl gardening is glimpsed.

It happens immediately as the episode opens. Got to keep the audience guessing in all ways. Getting down to business so quickly embodies the simple order that Yasashiki operates on. As the gardening hobby indicates, she's very down to earth, regardless of how high she stands above it. Similar to her heart-cracking introduction, the points of her personality and how Rentaro interfaces with them are cruised through quickly on her own terms. Yasashiki does have a complex about her height, but her interactions with nature already helped her accept herself and appreciate what's unique about herself. So it's a distinct setup from the last few girlfriends who specifically operated around Rentaro being the one to help them accept themselves.

That's a nice shift, to say nothing of a warm way for 100 Girlfriends to start introducing more and more differently shaped girlfriends. The characters have mostly run the anime high-school harem gamut thus far (with Hahari as a moderately MILFy exception), so having Yasashiki as an extra-tall representative with thick, strong legs helps her stand out. Er, "stand out" being an especially appropriate operative here, and lord knows I've got to walk the line in terms of writing my own silly stuff about her character design without feeling like I'm mocking her the same way she was in her backstory. Yasashiki is great, genuinely!

It's that genuine feeling that distinguishes the character and this episode as it finds the voice in its unique angle of approach. Yasashiki has mostly learned to love herself before she meets Rentaro (she does still have some hang-ups, as seen later), so their bonding can be shown developing via a much more grounded gardening get-together. There are still jokes, of course, including Rentaro physically breaking an onscreen text box or Yasashiki calling attention to her dedicated "weed garden" in an entendre I'm pretty sure was unintentional for the Japanese audience. But it's a very gentle sort of funny. It eases viewers into what the appeal of hanging out with Yasashiki would actually be.

At least until the Vice Principal shows up again. Man, I'd honestly kind of forgotten about her, and she does not do any favors parallel to Yasashiki's "everyone can be loved for who they are" concept. The Veep is, thankfully, not around too much, mostly facilitating Yasashiki's fear of fire coming to the fore, and letting Rentaro get a save-in to really crystallize the romance. Fire indeed hot, and this romance burns hotter, even for a gentle soul like Yasashiki. Also, Rentaro's confession of his other exponential entanglements lets 100 Girlfriends specifically term-drop polyamory (and its presence in nature!), which is always neat to get in a show like this.

The polycule thus introduced to Yasashiki continues with that distinguished perspective. She's such a genuinely loving presence, possibly the most earnest girlfriend yet, that she notably starts immediately getting on well with several of her co-partners. She can bond over Hakari with flowers and find fun in carrying the littlest girlfriends on her shoulders. Putting these kinds of connections up front will be important as the collection of cared-for characters compounds in 100 Girlfriends. The relationship web has to be charted to show how each of the girls interacts with the others and gives those previous paramours something to continuously do and avoid getting lost in the crowd. Matching Yasashiki up with Kusuri and the other fun-size friends is naturally a great idea just for visual gag purposes (we already saw her demonstrating it with the yet-to-be-introduced extra-tiny one in this season's opening episode) and I hope it continues. Each one of the other girlfriends is just as precious as this new one, after all, even if they have to be stacked vertically to match her in that arena.

The antics allow for consistent theming of those vibes even as the episode entertains the expected chaos of fourteen girls going through their various bits, just in flower crowns and dresses while gardening this time. Rentaro's love-struck by all of them, as he should be, and that's what matters. Well, that and convincing Yasashiki she's also worthy of receiving that love. Small wonder she's uncertain; she and Rentaro have been going out for a whole couple of hours by this point, she should know it's real. The indication is that it's specifically the affection-expressing element that still hangs her up on her height (nice to see her dad went to bat for her in the past though!). Of course, what she wasn't counting on is the fact that Rentaro is a man of taste. Women are his favorite guy, no matter what differences they have. He's a man who has so much love he'd prop all his girlfriends up so they could practice height-gap kissing like a romantically charged version of the "How to talk to short people" diagram. And yeah, this episode does indeed draw the act downright adorably.

Apart from the bits where an oversexed Vice Principal sets herself on fire, this is generally a lower-key episode of 100 Girlfriends, but it's doing so with purpose. It's still got the funny powering it, but here, the heartwarming moments feel even more embraced and unironic, with less undercutting them. Probably because nothing's sneaking in under Yasashiki's wide field of view. I do think there's a tricky line between writing all these gags around Yasashiki's height while also acknowledging the complex that comes from her being mocked for being different. But as with the defining details of all the girlfriends, in this case they succeed at making it appreciably light-hearted. This show thrives when it knows it has to make every entry feel different, because being different is a very good thing.

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The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Chris has watched at least 100 anime, and really really really really really thought most of them were at least okay. You can peruse his thoughts and see which cartoon girlfriends he's reposting art of over on his BlueSky.