Anteiku Anime Reviews

I was fully prepared to detest this anime. The premise is ridiculous. I ended up enjoying it. While it’s not the best rom-com ever made, it’s a very sweet experience overall.

I still think the premise is idiotic. It is idiotic. It’s another iteration of the idiotic premise phenomenon that appears more often than I’d like in anime. Fortunately, some significant percentage of the time anime makes ridiculous premises work very well. It’s part of the unexplained magic of anime that continually makes us crazy and then puts a smile on our faces. Another of the of the many reasons we love anime. I’m still gonna grill the premise in the Story section below though, so be prepared.

Other than the premise, this show is pretty good. I like the voice acting. The dynamics between the characters are good. The artwork is exquisite. Even the music is pretty good. I’m gonna be honest with you and repeat what I said above and say that I thought I’d be dropping this anime after I watched the first episode, but it kept my attention and eventually I began to follow it more closely, and ultimately this was one of those shows where I watched from OP to ED, which is fairly unusual for me. So while it’s nothing great, it’s fun and sweet, and if you love rom-com anime you definitely should see this show.

Some mildly adult content follows. Nothing crazy, but be advised as always.

Characters

Rating: 6

The characters were curious in this show. Curious in this way: they were all pretty memorable but none of them were extraordinarily evocative, which is a curious combination. But there’s a lot to like either way.

Akari Watanabe was the most evocative of the characters, in a number of different ways. Even she did not capture my heart like I thought she might however. Stare inside the Hawk’s mind very long and you will see a lot of love for the gyaru category of females. I tend to favor the kurogyaru types more than the frilly beauty queen versions (the spectrum has gotten kind of large over the years), but the commonalities between them make them appealing to me as a whole. Akari is on the pageant queen end of the spectrum, with lots of frilly, pretty clothes, lots of makeup, and exotic hair color. She has the distinct punkish vocabulary we associate with all gyaru types, which I like. So I was very ready to let my heart run wild with the wild Akari.

Then the tsundere behavior showed up. This persisted the entire duration of the show. Spoiler—even as she came more and more attached to Jirou she insisted on maintaining a certain level of distance between them with this behavior, all while belying all of that with her nearly incessant physical advances and teases. This bothered me about her and made her a little distasteful to me, impacting any positive feelings I might have had about her otherwise.

On one hand, I understand a big part of her character is how she wears her heart on her sleeve, and her heart is conflicted, so she exhibits these conflicting outward behaviors that send about as disparate mixed signals as ever lovers encountered. So her tsundereness isn’t as much an attempt to conceal her true feelings as it is an actual view into her heart. She’s conflicted between her crush on the popular boy Minami Tenjin and the relationship she’s pushed into with Jirou that has begun to make claims on her heart. So on this hand I think this is good writing and I applaud it. 

But on the other hand is my distaste for the tsundere type character. I have a couple of problems with it here. First, I just don’t prefer tsunderes. I don’t like that kind of mixed signal sending, real life or anime. And I definitely don’t like the forced hostility that goes with it. But put my personal feelings aside, my second reason I don’t like it here is because it feels out of character for Akari. While I believe Akari’s tsundereness is actually indicative of the conflict in her heart and so is actually very open of her, but at the same time it still feels outwardly like she’s hiding her feelings behind her hostility in a traditional tsundere manner. That doesn’t make sense for a gyaru character type, who usually have neither the shyness or uncertainty necessary for tsundere behavior.

So it bugged me a little in the way that tsundere behavior always does, but at the same time I also get it. So as a viewer I’m annoyed by Akari a little, but as a critic I’m pleased by this interesting use of tsundere behavior in a gyaru character by the author.

Akari otherwise is a dream girl, just like she’s supposed to be. Form, figure, personality (sans tsundereness), all those little things we get to see just a little of in nice characters like this, all of it is nearly perfect. She’s a sweet girl in a gyaru body, and the two intermix in her outward personality, and it’s a lot of fun to watch. One can easily understand how anybody could fall in love with her. 

I liked how Jirou was fairly distant from her initially but he eventually began to surrender his heart to her. That’s actually the best thing about Jirou. You’d think any guy would jump at the opportunity to be shacked up with Akari, pardon the crudity (Anya Forger did say it first, in so many words, so blame her for putting it in my mind). Yet this guy wholly intends to maintain his loyalty to his first love. He completely rejects Akari’s early teasing advances, albeit in an awkward way at times. He continues to reject her advances even as they began to evolve into more than teasing. It’s only when his heart truly begins to turn to Akari that he begins to accept and reciprocate these advances on a limited level. He doesn’t take advantage of the opportunity he has with Akari to “live his youth” or anything like that. 

It’s a little convenient from a writing standpoint, but it worked believably well here. If he’d resisted her to the end I would’ve said this was a little ridiculous, but he didn’t. He too developed conflict in his heart as he and Akari began to engulf each other. It’s well written. Jirou gradually and involuntarily has his feelings moved by this overwhelming female who is experiencing her own involuntary attraction to him. Neither of them picked each other out but neither could help falling in love with each other. Given the ridiculous premise, this is still pretty well written, and part of the reason I ended up liking this show despite the silly premise.

Jirou’s first love is his childhood friend, another of those, Shiori Sakurazaka. While I didn’t particularly find her interesting as a character, it was her involvement in this love triangle that began to get my attention about this show. It was because of her that I first noticed how well suited for each other Jirou and Akari were despite their outward differences. Because Jirou and Shiori are painfully awkward together. 

I liked this writing. I like it for a couple of reasons. The first is because it played effectively on the childhood friend/romance themes we see a lot in anime. That theme is almost entirely encompassed in the idea of children becoming aware of sexuality as they come of age, forcing childhood playmates into a situation where they have to confront this tension that arises between them. We’ve seen it a lot in anime. Here it causes Jirou and Shiori to exhibit a tremendous amount of discomfort in their interactions. That’s a pretty typical feature in dynamics like this in anime, but this show used it in a very interesting way. It took this typical osananajimi behavior and used it to spotlight how beautiful the growing relationship between Jirou and Akari was. Once you get to the end of the first season of this anime, after trying to figure out which person you’d rather Jirou end up with all throughout the show, you have no doubt that Akari is the better match for him. The writers did a great job making this apparent subtly by using Shiori and her childhood friendship with Jirou effectively. I write a bit more about this in the Story section below.

Those three are the primary characters in this show, and everyone else is just kind of there or plays a minor contributing role. Tenjin, the popular guy Akari crushes on, is a little more than a minor contributor simply because not only is he Akari’s reason for having a conflicted heart, but he also is Shiori’s partner in this silly class. On top of that, after spending most of the show feeling like he was actually becoming attracted to Shiori, we learned that he was not only not attracted to Akari (bursting her bubble, which was a little sad) but that he was actually in love with someone entirely different, not even Shiori. I don’t think we ever discovered who that was in S1, so maybe that will play a role in subsequent seasons. He was a fairly heartfelt character despite his limited time on screen. He ended up being a pretty nice guy, unlike the typical popular boy guys in anime who usually are trash other than their appearances.

Akari had her duo of gyaru buddies also who were fun. The trio of gyarus seems to be pretty common in anime for some reason. Can’t make a single best friend but don’t have tons of friends because of their gyaru cliqueishness I guess, so three is a nice number. Dunno. They’re a little more in the kurogyaru vein, or the one is at least, something I mentioned above, so I automatically found them appealing. But they were mostly just there as sidekicks, having even less impact on the show than Tenjin.

The biggest highlight among the supporting characters was a guy actually. Sadaharu Kamo (I laugh every time I hear that name, Sadaharu, usually thinking of Gintama) is hilarious. He’s the dorky friend of the male MC who’s supposed to make said male MC seem like an outsider dork himself. He predictably laments Jirou’s near brushes with lost virginity and all that, typical behavior of this character type. But it’s his dialogue and the way his VA delivers all of it that’s utterly hilarious. I’d have to choke back laughter in mixed company as I watched this show and Kamo would launch into one of his diatribes at Jirou. They were golden and made Kamo a very memorable character.

Speaking of voice acting, while it wasn’t going to win any awards in this show, I liked it a lot. Nobody was ever forced or felt like they were overacting a part. Akari, played by Saori Oonishi, seemed very free-spirited but also conflicted, not an overly effusive gyaru like we sometimes see in these character types. Oonishi had just finished playing another pink-haired female MC earlier in the year 2022, Shikimori from Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie. I thought she did better in this role than she did as Shikimori. The comparison was inevitable with that kind of seasonal proximity. 

Jirou was voiced by Seiichirou Yamashita. I like this guy. He has mostly played supporting roles in his time, such as Raiden Shuga from 86 and Kakeru Naruse in Orange. Only recently has he taken on some main roles with Jirou here and Cid Kagenou from The Eminence in Shadow. Cid is magnificent, as is much about that show, but even here as Jirou Yamashita-san impresses. He never overplays his part here. He could easily have tried to overdo Jirou’s shyness or discomfort, but he actually made him seem very human and even a little bit cool with his performance. I’m gonna keep an eye on this guy.

Kamo’s voice actor was Shou Nogami. Nogami-san looks like one of those dudes from Okamajima in One Piece, but man can he do a great job with his supporting roles! He’s done nearly invisible supporting characters mostly unfortunately, though I do easily remember him as Niro Androalphus, one of the zany teachers in Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun. I like this guy too. He should get more roles. He’s really good at applying the right tone for effective humor at the right moment.

Oh, I almost forgot Mei! Yuri alert! Mei Hamano is Shiori’s buddy at school, a tomboyish type with short hair. Yep, I liked her. But she likes Shiori, so she’s not available. Her role was kind of strange in this show. The writers definitely made a point of letting audiences know she was in love with Shiori all while she pushed Shiori to accelerate her relationship with Jirou. Anyway, voice actors: Yui Ogura plays her part, best known probably for Onna Shinkan from Goblin Slayer. I like her voice here. She had some nice lines.

Tenjin was played by Toshiki Masuda, who most of you will recognize as Kirishima from MHA. Waki Azumi (Senko, The Helpful Fox Senko) appears again, here as gyaru number 3 Natsumi Oonashi. Gyaru number 2, Sachi, is played by Minami Takahashi, who is Lucoa in Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. ‘Nuff said about that.

The reason I make such a point of the VAs here is because while no character is particularly great or memorable here, the dynamic between them makes them, and by extension the anime itself, very much memorable. The voice acting feels pretty natural for the most part, and part of that natural feel is brought about by the ease with which the voice actors interact. Even when the characters are supposed to feel uncomfortable together they feel naturally uncomfortable, not forced or put on. This natural flow of conversation, what sometimes people call “chemistry” among characters, is the thing I will remember the most about these character.

So while none of the characters were going to melt your heart particularly, they all had a really nice dynamic between them that made them memorable. It’s a nice set of characters together rather than individually, which is a little unusual itself.

Artwork

Rating: 8

It’s very pink. And very blue.

If you look at it carefully, you’ll likely get the impression that everything is very pink. If you keep looking you’ll notice that there’s a lot of blue to go along with that pink.

I think I can explain the pink part. Akari is all pink everywhere. Her hair is massive and flowing everywhere, and she’s all frilly and accented and pink all over despite her accessories and clothing which aren’t pink. Pink surrounds her. Another part of this, and another reason for the powerful pink feeling, are those bubble, shiny or sparkly backgrounds that we see a lot of in rom-com. Those predominantly are pink in this anime, and Akari is in a lot of them.

The blue I think comes from Jirou mostly. His hair is blue. He wears a blue shirt a lot of the time. His sparkly background are mostly blue (with some pink). A lot about him seems to be blue colored a lot of the time.

So we have a pink thing going on with Akari and a blue thing going on with Jirou. I don’t know how intentional that was or what significance, if any, was behind it. But it’s nice here. It creates a nice contrast. There are lots of contrasts in this anime, and I know those were intentional. More on that later.

Pink or blue and purple and shiny colors—the sheen on the artwork is very strong—make for an almost candy-like feeling on all the artwork. Most rom-com is bright and pretty, but I don’t recall one that was as vividly pastel as this one. The supporting characters were a little less pastel overall, but Jirou and Akari had enough pastel to go around, and since they got so much screentime the whole show got this bright, vivid pastel appearance. I liked it. It was a little different, a little unique, and had its own kind of beauty about it.

Is fluffy a good word to describe this coloring? Put together candy-like and fluffy and what comes to mind? When I look at this artwork that’s the sense I get. Language is a strange thing.

The eyes kind of followed this theme as well. Akari has gleaming teal eyes. They’re beautiful and full of life! Jirou himself has blueish purple eyes, even though they’re very small relative to the girls’ eyes. Even Tenjin had purple eyes, very unusual for anime guys. Shiori had green eyes, very nice as always. She had a very natural appearance even with the vivid green eyes, making her unique among a pink-haired, teal-eyed heroine and her blue-haired partner and her bleached-blonde, purple-eyed crush. Shiori’s brown hair was, once again, a contrast.

So definitely rom-com artwork, but also just a little different. I like that. It was more than rom-com artwork, but not something entirely unrecognizable. So yeah, it definitely fits this show.

Story

Rating: 7

So I mentioned a little about contrasts so far, both in character and artwork aspects, but contrasts stood out the most in the story itself. The authors behind this show definitely…

Hawk, wait wait wait, hold on here a minute, chotto matte. You’re going to ignore the elephant in the room here? 

This show’s premise is idiotic! 

What the fudgezilla hellfire flavored lollipops is this? To help prepare them for life in society (ahem), Japan has decided that students should have a two semester course (practical?) where they play married couples. It’s like home-ed just with sex. Or home-ed in a classroom/prison. With sex. And forget about the parents. What could go wrong?

I wanted to just randomly start smashing the keyboard when I first wrote about this show in an attempt to describe the lack of human language that formed the thoughts in my brain. Neither “what?” or “nani?” was anywhere near sufficient. I still can’t get it together to talk about this. Whatz iz dizzeet?!?

I watched the whole first episode. I didn’t really absorb much of what happened, but I watched it. When I was done, my first thought was that there was a massively high probability I’d be dropping this. I don’t drop many anime. The critic in me says no, and rightfully so. I was about to board the drop-it train. I was looking for the ticket window. I’d made it to the station and was planning the escape after just one episode.

Perhaps the biggest token of praise I have for this show is that, after all that, I didn’t drop it. No way I was going to. I even looked back at times and wondered why I didn’t, because this premise is so contrived, so horrifyingly stupid, that I don’t know how I could have even started watching this if I’d read the synopsis. Yet it again goes to show you that you can hardly judge anime from synopses or first episodes. I stayed with it and never regretted it. Despite the mind-shatteringly ridiculous premise.

I described the positives of the characters and the artwork. Those definitely kept me watching. But once I’d committed to at least watching this show for critical reasons, something began to catch my attention that raised my estimation of it a lot. It had a long way to come up given that silly premise, but this aspect I’d begun to notice definitely elevated this show up to a much higher level very quickly.

I debated whether to discuss contrasts in this Story section or put in the character section, because the characters are the ones that exhibit all these contrasts. Even the artwork contrasts are based entirely around the characters. But I ultimately decided that this contrasting was a storytelling element, and therefore included it here.

The artwork contrast wasn’t the first one I noticed. And it goes without saying that Jirou and Akari were contrasts, but that was a given and didn’t catch my attention particularly in a contrast sense. It wasn’t until around the middle episodes when Jirou and Akari began to have strong feelings for each other and this began to impact their interactions with their first loves that this got my attention. The biggest one was between Shiori and Jirou.

Their extreme discomfort with each other was the first thing I noticed. Jirou would be with Akari, and she’d berate him or tease him, and he’d fire back at her in subdued frustration, and then he’d go out and run into Shiori and they’d barely be able to say a word to each other. He and Akari, despite the tenor and manner of their communication, were comfortable being themselves around each other. Jirou and Shiori had forgotten how to interact with each other normally, and it clearly showed. The writers intentionally made it seem so.

In fact, there came a point where the writers highlighted this in a very interesting way. This is where the idea of contrasts in this anime most got my attention and finally registered in my mind. Somewhere around the halfway point of this anime, for at least two different episodes, suddenly Shiori’s communications with Jirou became filled with what could be construed as sexual innuendos. They were in a kitchen together once and it was so awkwardly uncomfortable given the things she was saying that I cringed hard. This same thing happened at least one other time later, though I forget the setting. Jirou noticed it. But I don’t think Shiori was supposed to be doing it intentionally. Her conversation was all accidentally extremely sexual.

At first glance one might think this was just another instance of this kind of thing in rom-com. We see that kind of thing pretty regularly in this genre (“it’s tight!”, “I’ve never felt this way before!”, “come inside!”—you get the idea). The innocent speech of younglings learning about love which us overly experienced adults understand the innuendo of, for better or worse. So at first you think Shiori’s uncomfortable gibberings are just another instance of that. But something particular about this made me think that this was actually intentional done by the writers to highlight the difference between Jirou and Shiori, and by extension highlight the chemistry between him and Akari.

This was very unusual behavior for Shiori. Let’s say it was intentional from her. That more than anything is extremely unlike her. She’s shy, reserved, traditional, young and girly but very conservative. No showy clothes, not overly fussy about her appearance, just a nice, easy-going, sweet girl-next-door type. For her to venture into sexual innuendos is shocking. So we have to assume it’s unintentional on her part. Why then do the authors include it if not to give Shiori a way to intentionally attempt to attract Jirou?

It was even more unusual given the way Akari interacted with Jirou. Akari never made innuendos, or at least not ambiguous ones, ones that could have double meaning given the nature of the conversation at hand. Whenever she teased Jirou in a sexual manner, it was pretty obvious in a verbal way. Not to mention that any verbal sexual teases Akari made paled in comparison to her physical advances on Jirou, which dominated much of their interactions. Whether she was teasing or right on the edge of peeling off articles of clothing, it was pretty clear what she was saying. Ambiguity came simply from teasing or her own shyness (and the conflict in her heart, aforementioned), not from discomfort with the situation or her interactions with Jirou. This was extremely different from how Shiori was behaving around Jirou.

So Akari was intentional and pretty overt and mostly physical in her sexual advances, and Shiori, whatever she was trying to do, seemed unintentional, confused, and completely verbal in her accidental sexual references (I can’t even call them advances) with Jirou. These two situations were about as opposite as they could be.

Add Jirou himself into this mix and stir well. Jirou was mostly closed to Akari’s overt advances. Whether he assumed she was always just teasing him or was showing loyalty to Shiori or somewhere in between or else entirely, he mostly pushed Akari away (at least until he began to have genuine feelings for her). On the other hand, he would have been completely receptive to Shiori’s sexual advances if she had made them. Indeed he was, when Shiori finally got up the courage to kiss him. But he seemed completely confused by Shiori’s odd language in these handful of encounters. He was so flustered with discomfort at being alone with her that he couldn’t even process her language, be that language intentional or otherwise. I think there were a couple of times he saw the double meaning even if she didn’t, but it didn’t reduce his confusion or make him any more comfortable around her.

You’d think Jirou might interpret this as sexual advances from Shiori. He would have been receptive to it, aforementioned. But he didn’t seem to. On the other hand, despite how foreign it all was to him, he seemed to understand Akari and her gyaru lingo and behaviors pretty well, apart from the lovers’ misunderstandings that are common to rom-com that they experienced. He always seemed clearer on what Akari was saying than he did on what Shiori was, or was not, saying.

The point of all this is that I believe the authors were highlighting Jirou’s comfort with Akari and his discomfort with Shiori through this otherwise normal rom-com feature of sexual innuendos. Shiori was so uncomfortable around Jirou that she fumbled out one sexual innuendo after another without knowing it, while Akari was so comfortable around him she could make sexual advances in both a teasing and real manner and never bat an eye. The writers disguised an interesting look at the differences between the relationship between these two and Jirou through a fairly ordinary rom-com anime device.

I liked this. It definitely highlighted the differences between the two. It was one of those things that came to make you realize how perfect Akari and Jirou were for each other despite how outwardly different they seemed. That was very sweet. 

But it was more than just sweet. The way the writers handled this, it took most of the episodes of S1 to come to this conclusion, at least for me. I kept wondering why things couldn’t seem to work between Jirou and Shiori. I saw how uncomfortable they were with each other and began to realize that was written into their interaction intentionally. And I knew in the back of my mind that the record for childhood friends is pretty poor in regards to winning the main character’s heart in the end. But on the other hand I saw how different Akari and Jirou were and couldn’t see them being together at all. I slowly came to realize that not only were Shiori and Jirou not very compatible, but that he and Akari were nearly perfect for each other. The writers did a great job taking it slow in showing this to us.

All of that lay very closely around the main plot thread as well, which demonstrates good control of the story by the authors. You’ll hear me talk a lot about how stories can get out of hand and take on a life of their own sometimes if the author doesn’t have the ability to manage them effectively. This never happened here. The story remained focused on Akari and Jirou’s relationship slowly overtaking their previous crushes, all as they dealt with those prior crushes and learned about their own feelings for each other.

One might think “Well duh, if a guy and girl were forced together like this it’d make sense that they’d fall for each other.” This is where the stupid premise and the otherwise very good writing collided very positively. Yes Akari and Jirou do fall for each other “predictably,” but think about it. The show mentions that many other pairs of students are getting into relationships, but not all of them are. It seems like Tenjin and Shiori are falling for each other, but then we learn that Tenjin actually is in love with someone else entirely, or even if it is Shiori (unclear at this point), it’s 100% clear she isn’t falling for him. So pairs don’t always end up together in reality.

And you have the thing where if the pairs rank high enough in points for their home life interactions they can switch to another partner of their choice. So the point of the pairs isn’t to pair them for life. It seems stupid but it’s an interesting dynamic for these pairs, and certainly for main characters. So it’s not a certainty that pairs will get together, and Jirou and Akari actually agree to work together so they can get with someone else after the allotted amount of time or whatever the criteria was. Yet, despite their differences and their intentions, they end up loving each other.

Convenient yes, but I think the authors were aware of this too. Akari and Jirou have the conversation about halfway through the series that every anime fan who has watched these convenient rom-com scenarios play out has had internally. They talk briefly about how if it weren’t for this class they probably never would have even become friends. This showed my that the authors were aware of the convenience of their own plot device, demonstrating they understood their tale and how to control it. And it was really sad to hear Akari and Jirou talk about this, knowing it was true. So even the ridiculous premise was turned into a useful plot device, both for this brief moment and for the show overall.

That’s how a show with as stupid a start as this one came to catch my attention and hold it throughout the Fall 2022 season. That’s pretty good writing, say what you will about what’s going on in the author’s brain. 

Overall: 7

Seinen rom-com! This is somewhat unusual in anime. And at that rate you might expect it to be more…more…you know. But as much ecchiness as there is in this anime (verbally and visually—it’s pretty mild though, don’t get me wrong) it’s far from feeling like it’s being overtly aimed at adults through the inclusion of far too many egregious elements. So I like that it’s simple and sweet and for adults. We see some of that in seinen romance drama in anime (many of which I really, really like), but you don’t see a lot of rom-com at all, much less just this simple-sweet kind.

I like what this show tried to do with contrasts. I should have recognized this earlier on just by the title of the show, which implies oppositional positions that must unavoidably interact. Duality is a curious thing in literature, and while I won’t presume to offer too much of an opinion on it, it’s interesting to see it so effectively used in this anime. Oftentimes opposites are overdone in anime, and even more oftentimes are overdone so without any clear reason from the author. There’s nothing wrong with any of that by itself, but it’s an exception, and a good one, when contrasts are used to good effect like they are here. It gives this show a little something extra. It makes it a little more than just a normal rom-com.

The OP and ED are fun and pretty. Visually they continue the artwork themes I mentioned above and even expand on them a little. Audibly they are fun. The OP is light and lively. The ED is smooth and silky and has a wonderful slow rhythm. Both slowly won my senses over as I proceeded through this show, and eventually I watched all the way through both instead of skipping them like I usually do. I ended up really liking the ED. It showed off Akari nicely and I loved that heavy rhythm.

“Slowly winning you over” is kind of the theme of this show. The OP and ED slowly won me over. Akari and Jirou slowly come to love each other despite intending otherwise. Despite a horrifying start this show slowly won me over to the point I really enjoyed it and began to make a point of watching it every week regularly. So while it wasn’t anything great, it was really nice. It was nice like rom-coms should be. It was more than ridiculous, but not intolerable. It was more than just sweet, but not heartbreaking. Just like Jirou and Akari were, kind of, more than a married couple, but not lovers.