Why did I watch this again?
I'm just going to admit it right now--I have a love/hate relationship with harem anime. I enjoy watching them ironically, but every now and then, I do find something in these shows that I genuinely enjoy, usually coming a specific character arc. It's a bit hard to explain since I don't entirely understand it myself (for the record, I often feel the same way about reverse harem shows) but for the time being I've labeled it a guilty pleasure and left it at that. So to answer my own question--why did I watch this--it was because I heard that the "main girl" was a tsundere, and hey, I like tsundere romances. In that vein, the first couple episodes were great--relatively speaking. The plot (if you could call it that) focusing on integrating an all-girls school into a co-ed school was weak at best and I could've cared less about the rest of the harem since they were all characterized so blandly, but I wasn't there for any of that anyway. I was watching for Airi, the girl who, if the promotional materials and OP were to be believed, would be the girl our incredibly bland protagonist would chose at the end. I was happy when she quickly dropped the tsun and went for the dere, convinced that I would get the generic plotline that I loved anyway, when the show moved into the other girls story arcs without completely resolving Airi's. Well, that's just the way it goes, I thought, everyone's waifu has to get some screentime and then we'll go back to Airi in the end. Unfortunately, I was wrong. The school integration plotline was quickly forgotten in favor of a join-the-school-wildlife-club-and-save-the-kitties one. Spoiler: the kittens are the best part of the show.
Anyway, as the show went on, Airi was pushed further and further into the background in favor of Sena, the other tsundere in the show who is of the constant abuse variety. And because this is a harem, she easily falls in love with the bland male lead and does not drop her tsun like Airi did. Behind Sena but a little more in the foreground than Airi and the rest of the harem was Miu, the president of the club whose only character trait was that she liked animals. From here on out, the majority of the show focused on the club, finding homes for two kittens that they rescued and watching Sena struggle with her feelings. All through this, I was still convinced that the show would get back to Airi. Until episode 10 happened, when the bland male lead confesses his undying love to the bland club president, leaving Sena crying in the rain and Airi declaring an episode later that she will never fall in love. I am fine with a harem anime deciding to go a different route than the main path. In fact, that should happen more. This genre gets a lot of hate precisely because of how stagnated its become, playing to specific tropes and knowing its audience a little too well. But here, I felt like I'd been played for a fool. Going off of the promotional materials, I had been expecting Airi end. Going off of screentime and drawn-out development, it should have been Sena. Rather than a genuine plot development, I feel like this is a marketing ploy. Didn't like the ending? Buy the game! You don't want Airi to be alone forever, do you? And get the Sena Nendo while you're at it! It was a trap, and I walked right into it. Note to self: go back to only watching ero adaptations ironically. Getting involved never ends well.
...At least he didn't pick the maid.
Images from Crunchyroll.com.
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