Maybe a better title would have been “Izumi-san Actually is Just a Cutie”.

After two episodes this show is something of a puzzler for me.  I sort of like it but there’s also something about it that kind of feels off.  As I was watching this episode the thought that kept occurring to me was “if the genders were reversed, there’s no way they’d get away with this.”  I mean, if Izumi were the girl and Shikimori were the guy I think there would be a firestorm of criticism over how sexist this series was.  And I think it’d be justified.  So does the fact that Izumi is the boy make this all OK?  And should it?

When the questions surrounding a show are more interesting than the show itself, you have a problem.  Not that interesting questions are bad – I like series that make me grind a little.  But I wish the story and characters themselves were grabbing me more.  What I think we have here is a male lead who exemplifies very old stereotypes of female leads – Izumi is for all intents and purposes a damsel-in-distress (and a dojikko).  And Shikimori a dashing prince.  Now, that’s a pretty old-fashioned way of looking at the world (even in shoujo manga these days) and there’s a reason we don’t see modern settings with that dynamic much anymore.

What I really wonder is whether this is an intentional twist by the mangaka, or I’m reading too much into it.  It definitely plays that way – it’s just a matter of whether it’s supposed to.  Izumi is objectified as surely as we’ve seen female characters objectified in fiction since time immemorial.  He’s helpless, he’s weak, he constantly needs protection.  The girls remark on how cute he is.  He’s an appendage to Shikimori-san, basically, an opportunity for her to show off and be heroic – like a gender-flipped very old-fashioned shoujo.  Looked at another way, this dynamic is actually something we wouldn’t be surprised to see in a BL series – except one of the “Bs” is a “G” (Shikimori even says “Seme sugi” – “I’m being too aggressive”- after the infirmary scene, as my colleague Princess Usagi pointed out).

Now – is that something I want to watch?  Honestly, probably not.  I’m not a big fan of the vibe with these two frankly.  They’re nice people, but Izumi’s portrayal is kind of degrading, no matter what gender he is.  And it’s just not that interesting to have one utterly helpless romantic partner rely totally on the other, who’s basically a superhero.  And why is Izumi cursed in the first place?  I get that he’s clumsy – some people are.  Some people are non-athletic, too, and they’re no less worthy for it.  But why does misfortune seek him out to unerringly that he needs Shikimori (and Inuzaka-kun for that matter) to be his knight-errant?

Given the pedigree of the anime staff and the seeming high regard for the manga (though that’s no sure indicator), I’ll give Kawaii Dake Shikimori-san at least one more episode to make an impression on me.  I freely accept that there may be some other layer to this story I’m just not grokking yet.  But of course that may not be a simple proposition – Doga Kobo’s closure due to a COVID-19 outbreak has imperiled this production, and I’ve seen no updates as to its status.  It seems entirely possible this series could get pushed back to summer (where it might actually have less competition), so obviously any coverage decisions are going to be contingent on how this potential delay plays out.