Chris
Lucas, fall is here, and love is...less in the air than it was in the spring and summer seasons. We've got a fair few shows for our requisite romcom rundown, but several of them are edge cases, or shorts, or prioritize points besides puppy love.
So why don't we cut to the chase ourselves and "fall" in love this season with what's available?
Lucas
Chris, ordinarily I'd offer some condolences to our readers who are fans of romcoms in the face of this seasonal shortage. Thankfully, though, this is a quality over quantity situation and the romcoms that we do get this time around are some of the best we've had in a long time! In fact, if Rebecca will allow me to dip into my "swear allotment" for the month, I'd even go so far as to say that these romcoms fuck!
And I mean that in every sense of the word! Beyond their unusually high quality as works of animation, there are an unprecedented number of RomComs featuring characters actually hooking up this season, and I couldn't be more thrilled about it!
Yeah, several of these entries are real surprise gems, especially given their status and presentation out of the gate. By which I mean we can start with I'm Dating a Dark Summoner, which is an auspicious half-length hentai short, and also, somehow, probably the most entertaining pure, proper romcom we've got this season!
Technically a LitRPG series, the core of this show revolves around a goth girl, Amona, and a religious guy, Roni, letting their initial contempt for each other boil over into a raucous night of passion, which immediately becomes a tender and deliciously illicit subject for them and everyone around them.
This image contains sexually suggestive themes. Click to view
The dynamic between these characters and the fun the show has at their expense is nothing short of a delight. Beyond being the only piece of media that I can think of that successfully pulls off the "two characters cannot leave this room until they have sex" trope, even the title, I'm Dating a Dark Summoner, itself is an amazing gag, as neither of these characters would admit to being in a relationship with the other!
Oh yeah, might as well start with a show to necessitate an age-gate on this column too; this one's for the grown-ups. Nipples for everyone, including Roni and his essential male ones.
This image contains sexually suggestive themes. Click to view
Rather than just feeling underfunded, as is the state of hentai today (and which will come up later in this column), I like how Dark Summoner comes across like it's actually using its short status to its benefit. The humor is tightly timed, with just enough space for the pair to express their snappy rapport while still having precious seconds to get down-and-dirty. And even then they still make space to include jokes during the sex stuff! You so rarely see that, despite goofiness in bed being an inherent part of the human (or demon) relationship experience.
Also, variety. As you said, we're only two episodes in the pair are already up to a sex escape room challenge. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what other ways Amona and Roni are going to find to spice things up.
Having peeked ahead into the third episode, I'm thrilled to share that the fantasy world they inhabit begins to motivate some wacky scenarios for them, with the introduction of what appears to be a literal semen daemon.
With I'm Dating a Dark Summoner being so good that it motivated me to read the manga, I'm thrilled to share that this work actually follows the path of Interspecies Reviewers, with the anime being FAR more explicit than anything we see in the manga.
It's really firing on all cylinders for me, and I'll gladly devote fifteen minutes of my life to it every week for the rest of this season, or in any season if we're lucky enough to be blessed with a second season for this hilariously smutty romp.
It's a nice little pick-me-up, precisely what a series of this nature is supposed to be! It really lets Dark Summoner shine compared to the more subdued efforts of the other "regular" romcoms this season.
You compare the confident raunchiness of Dark Summoner to something like The Cold Sato-san is Only Sweet to Me, which is about as rip-roaring an effort as you would expect from a show about two awkward teens taking food pics for Instagram—I'm sorry, Minstagram.
Chris, if you and our readers will allow me to voice an opinion that brushes up against misogyny (the irony of having to preface this after praising phonography is not lost on me), I am so sick of anime that frame a character as "the prettiest girl in our class/community/world," and then she looks like the default lady avatar in an anime RPG!
Look, we set a high bar leading with Dark Summoner, where the two leads had, like, actual character designs.
The Cold Sato-san is Only Sweet to Me, which really should have been titled The Salty Sato-san is Only Sweet to Me as the light novel is localized as The Salty Koharu Has a Soft Spot for Me, is such a weird show! It feels like it's an attempt at positive PR for being an adolescent in high school, but it's written by somebody who was never a teenager and reduces the characters to stereotypes of teenagers like "wants to date the prettiest girl in class" and "likes social media."
I get that these characters are intentionally bland so that a prospective viewer can more easily map themselves and their crush onto them, but it leans so far into this palatability that I can only see this show being appealing to aliens who have no immediate experience whatsoever with the human condition.
You see this a lot with these modern light-novel-derived high-school romance-comedies. Every story is someone's first, I get it, but a series still needs to have some distinctive energy to grab said audience's attention. The most The Cold Sato gave me was Sota's muscled-up dad explicitly shipping his son with his crush. That ain't gonna carry a show like this.
Also, and this may be a personal nitpick, but The Cold Sato does that thing where it internally confirms the two leads are genuinely in love with each other right from the jump, which for me always sucks the air out of the all-important are-they/aren't-they will-they/won't-they and just turns the whole experience into a watch-checking holding pattern.
As someone who does not catch romantic feelings for other people in a way that could be described as a crush, this trope is especially annoying for me. I want to shake these kids and tell them to communicate with each other so that we can move on to a, hopefully, better story already!
Speaking of better stories, Hello, I am a Witch, and my Crush Wants me to Make a Love Potion! is WAY better than its extremely light novel-ass title would make folks think at first glance!
It feels way more intentional in its style and direction, coming off of the likes of The Cold Sato. Really atmospheric in its depiction of the titular witch's lonely days in her workshop.
I'm not sure how much comedy Hello Witch can mine out of Rose's sad girl apartment lake house, but it's still working for me after the first two episodes!
I'm also really curious to see if the show follows through on what it's setting up as a critique of Rose's incredibly sheltered life. With so many romcoms being rooted in reductive ideas of finding a "soulmate" who will love you exactly the way you are, I'd be really interested in watching a show that acknowledges that self-improvement is often the first step in participating in a romantic relationship.
I mean, they're already being extremely unsubtle with the allegories, Rose learning that putting a bit more work into the presentation of her potions can make them more desirable...hint, hint.
Though even on a non-symbolic level, I love a show like this going into the marketing of this stuff in a fantasy world. It's an angle I don't know that I've really seen before, and it absolutely tickles the part of me that is, uh, a marketer.
Between these themes of self-improvement that feel more important now than ever in today's dating landscape and Rose feeling like an actual young woman who's never navigated feelings of romantic interest before, this is another romcom bringing up the seasonal average by a hefty margin!
Though Even Though I’m a Super Timid Noble Girl, I Accepted the Bet From My Cunning Fiancé, if the title length didn't give it away, is also this season's crossover with the isekai lineup, so it's playing with a hefty handicap to begin with.
Aside from having one of the rare good poop jokes in anime, I found Timid Noble Girl to be more of a confusing experience than anything else.
It's overtly an isekai where a college student is transported into her favorite otome game shortly after getting cheated on and trying to catch a rebound with truck[knife]-kun, but the narrative keeps introducing new plot points and characters that are surprising to her. I'd much rather watch a story where the protagonist has to use her cunning and knowledge of these characters and how the story is supposed to unfold to create a scenario that's advantageous to her against all odds, rather than just passively let this game's bonus content happen to her.
I agree it's an odd one just in its tone and pacing. It does have a hook in Pia's paleontology focus, which is kinda neat and absolutely sticks out in a setting like this.
And there's an implication that this could factor into Pia's interactions with the rest of the setting, story, and powers in this world. But thus far, it's mostly, as you said, passive. Even the titular cunning fiancé has just been kinda generally pleasant in his support of her. Mostly I keep getting distracted by how much he looks like Hansel from Black Lagoon.
I don't think Super Timid Noble Girl is quite as sleepy as the likes of The Cold Sato, but it sure ain't winning this romcom roundup and probably isn't coming out on top of the isekai one either.
Agreed. Maybe I'll dip back in when the homewrecker who's supposed to be the protagonist of this game shows up, but I already feel like I may have given this anime too much time.
And speaking of homewreckers...I like the overtly pornographic My Girlfriend's Friend WAY more than I thought I would! I'm fully aware that it's trash TV, but it has me chomping on popcorn from start to finish with every new episode!
Ah, and here we find ourselves moving out of anything that could be considered "traditional" romcoms and into the true porny shorts of the season, courtesy of our pal OceanVeil! Weirdly, they weren't streaming Dark Summoner; HIDIVE swooped them in on that one, but they did get several others that don't quite focus on the "Comedy" part much either.
I'll admit that my appreciation for My Girlfriend's Friend is fully rooted in my sense of irony, but as a polyamorous person who's never once felt anxious about a partner cheating on me, it's a lot of fun to see these characters running around and dealing with feelings and anxieties that I'm entirely detached from.
Also, the ending animations where they're all doing office roleplay and accidentally defining the characters and their relationships by depicting how they would organically fit into that environment are fun!
Okay, the office roleplay bits are the sole segments that have gotten a laugh out of me in each episode of this show. So I guess it technically does deliver on the comedy front! You could probably write a whole (better) series around this gimmick!
For my part, I have a hard time even finding ironic enjoyment in My Girlfriend's Friend. It mostly just feels sad to me, being an amateurishly directed take on fetish material that seems to have no idea how to actually indulge in the appeal of it.
This image contains sexually suggestive themes. Click to view
I can see finding humor in the ineptitude, but as I alluded to earlier, it depressingly speaks to the state of hentai anime these days (and makes a bright spot like Dark Summoner shine even more).
Agreed, and even my ironic appreciation for a sexually repressed/immature person's reaction to things like newfound intimacy and adultery can't excuse the amateurish staging and blocking we see again and again in this show.
I see how that can happen, given that they both feature reality manipulation of some sort and girls built like MILFs despite one supposedly taking place in high school.
For my part, Mouse Cursor gets the edge just by having the slightly more novel (read: exceptionally goofy) gimmick, and actually having fun with itself in that manner by the second episode.
Yes, it's exceptionally silly watching girls writhe around as our boy seemingly plays with himself with his mouse in his pocket, but it's so absurd with the accompanying visualizations that I can rest assured I don't need to take it too seriously.
Faaaaaaaaair~ and I'm inclined to agree with you, at least until the giant oni woman that Snow Widow has been teasing in all of the promotional material shows up.
Seriously, smut where characters are openly and enthusiastically hooking up shouldn't be this rare! And, dang, that's three OceanVeil romcoms in a row that are misses or only ironically good. That's really a shame with how much the platform has done to make more obscure and works that are difficult to host in a growingly puritanical internet more available. I really want to recommend that more casual anime fans subscribe to OceanVeil, but it's really hard to when there isn't a breakout hit on the-
Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! may be the best anime of the season, romcom or otherwise, and is singularly worth a US$12 sub to OceanVeil!!!
It feels all too appropriate that Passione's projects have found regular homes on the platform, and Student Council Holes might be the biggest dark horse of a get for the platform since they brought Interspecies Reviewers back from licensing purgatory.
This image contains sexually suggestive themes. Click to view
While I kind of expected a bawdy school comedy just from all the parties involved here, Student Council Holes truly blew me away with the level of comedy it is. The horniness is part and parcel of the experiences of the students and the jokes it fuels, and it feels simultaneously relatable and unbelievably outrageous because of that.
The sheer amount of hormones powering everything here also means that this show totally has twinges of romance along with all its comedy, so it's absolutely valid to cover in this column, and we aren't bringing it in just because we really, really like it, no sir.
Dude, Student Council Holes was made by people who remember what it was like to be teenagers. And that makes it such a great and entertaining experience from top to bottom. From the ensemble cast filled with characters who are all deeply aware of their sexuality but all in different places with it, to half the characters acting like dumbasses about their feelings because they have literally never felt these feelings before, and the girls' music club that is just a lesbian polycule where the members might not even realize that they're all in a relationship; I love this show to bits, and it so joyously captures my own experiences in navigating adolescence.
Being an ensemble comedy really lets this show cut loose with depicting those different archetypes (or pigeonholes, I guess you could say) and how they can be mined for hormonally inclined comedy. No one in this is the normal one; even lead dude Mizunoe is an exercise in playing off the expectations of a glasses guy who joins the student council—he's actually got a lot of gaps, academically! Plus, as the aforementioned lesbian polycule shows, it means they can explore a lot of different perspectives for sex comedy as opposed to purely putting the "straight" in "straight-laced."
Like it's already being implied that the aforementioned femboy Tan actually does have a thing for Mizunoe, and the two of them got a whole heaping helping of sexually charged healing in the last episode.
Oh, agreed! And we should probably drop a PSA for the entire internet now: Tan Otori is a great character within the show and, similarly to how the rest of the main cast is a dissection of gifted and talented kid archetypes, is a great examination of how a constant need for external validation can warp a young person's identity and behavior. That being said, DO NOT ENGAGE with any social media accounts that use his adorable mug as an avatar!!! Anyone emulating this character will not be pleasant to talk to on the internet!
God, the poor kid could potentially be the successor to a whole hoard of smug Nagatoro profile pics.
Oh god, I do not want to know the average Nagatoro fanboy's opinion on femboys...
But yes! Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! is so fun and frenetic, while also being so much more relatable than a romcom like Cold Sato because it is explicitly informed by the actual feelings and experiences of the people behind it. It's nothing short of a shot in the arm, and I wish we got an anime this itself every season!
Agreed that this has been the surprise of the season for me. It's such an energizing take on a show featuring romance and comedy that, like the other stronger entries this season, shows how fresh that space can be made alongside any mediocrity.
Also, even with chaff like My Girlfriend's Friend, Mouse Cursor, and Lonely Snow Widow, it's still notable that OceanVeil is committed to rolling those shows out, and alongside great gets like Student Council Holes as well as shows like Dark Summoner on other platforms, it feels like there really is a lot of fresh life and new horizons invigorating the anime space even in a lighter-seeming season like this.
Can't believe we got that just from running down the meager romcom offerings this season.
Hey, while I love me a season of anime that feels like it's pushing this medium forward, I'm just as enamored with a quieter season that allows some of the odder and less broadly appealing works in this space to shine! While Even the Student Council Has Its Holes! is the breakout of tonight's convo, this season is full of the kind of hyper-specific, lifelong anime fan-inducing titles that actually get people to stick around in this community, and I can't wait to talk about all of them in future installments of this column!
I'm glad we could have so much fun with what we got tonight. The best of these stories remind us of the loving joys of being human, and the importance of taking care of ourselves.
There's not quite as much love in the air this fall, but Chris and Lucas do their best to find it.― There's not quite as much love in the air this fall, but Chris and Lucas do their best to find it. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. OceanVeil streams My Girlfriend's Friend, The Lonely Snow Widow and the Cursed R...
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