I defy anyone to look at Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai and not compare it to Gotoubun no Hanayome, which aired this past season. Loser guys tutoring beautiful girls has certainly become a sub-genre in its own right (I wish I could blame LNs, but most of them seem to come from manga), it’s true. But here you’ve got both guys tutoring five girls, both guys being being dirt poor and needing to make it work for financial reasons. I dropped Gotoubun after two episodes so maybe I’m not the best one to say how deep the similarities are, but the superficial ones sure are unmistakable.
That said, while I suspect Gotoubun will go down as the more commercially successful of the two (I’m pretty certain the manga is more popular) I liked the first episode of Bokutachi a little better. There are plenty of tropes here, but it didn’t feel as if Bokutachi was trying quite as hard to work its way down a checklist, if you know what I mean. And the tone was generally a little more restrained, as was the direction by longtime veteran Iwasaki Yoshiaki. Nothing here exactly blew me away, but all in all the premiere was fairly likeable.
In this instance the girls in question aren’t sisters, and we only meet two of them in the first episode – a math genius who sucks at the humanities (Ogata Rizu), and a humanities genius who sucks at the hard sciences and math (Furuhashi Fumino). The tutor is an overachieving guy who’s desperate (he has several younger siblings and his father has died) to get the school’s VIP scholarship and save on tuition money. The principal ends up offering Nariuki Yuiga the scholarship as long as he agrees to tutor Rizu and Fumino on their weak subjects, and hilarity (well, the odd chuckle) ensues.
The best I can say is, “it sounds worse than it is”. We get some very standard developments such as one girl being tsun and the other dere, and Yuiga making assumptions about them that turn out to be wrong, and there’s a very unfortunate brocon imouto sighting late in the episode. But generally speaking the characters are decent to each other, and the girls’ reasons for wanting to improve in their rough subjects are actually rather believable. This seems like pretty lightweight stuff on the whole and it’s certainly old hat these days, but at least it’s inoffensive and even modestly charming on occasion.
Proto
April 8, 2019 at 12:14 amI have yet to watch either anime, but from the manga the main advantage We can’t study has over the quintuplets series is that We can’t study does not take itself quite as seriously. While they are both romcoms, Bokutachi is solidly in the comedy camp while the Quintuplets go for the romance melodrama.
Guardian Enzo
April 8, 2019 at 12:20 amI’ll buy that.
karma
April 8, 2019 at 2:10 amSounds like a serious disadvantage (if I can understand it as a lack of plot progression). No wonder that it’s compared more often to Nisekoi than Go-toubun no Hanayome.
Arabesque
April 8, 2019 at 5:40 amIt’s more compared to Nisekoi over Quintuplets due to the genesis of who We Never Learn mangaka is (Taishi Tsutsui drew the official spin off for Nisekoi and got to do a romcom after Nisekoi’s conclusion in the magazine) but even beyond that, I would say We Never Learn is a different beast than Quintuplets or Nisekoi, even if all of them seem to come from the same clade.
We Never Learn is much raunchier later on than Nisekoi ever was (that series depended more on the comedy and character interactions as the driving force for its run, and tried to limit where it could the usage of cheap fanservice for its gags) but the plot progression is more pronounced in We Never Learn in a way that Nisekoi wishes it had.
The series goes into exploring what it means to grow up and choosing to go into the profession you like or studying for something you love verse something you are good in, and the consequences that might have on your life and the lives of the people close to you. I wouldn’t say it does it in a new or interesting manner, but it does enough to keep it pretty engaging while also causing the central cast to continue to grow and change over the course of a 100 chapters. In the same time frame, Nisekoi was pretty much stuck in the romcom status quo (which could be very funny, because Naoshi has the talent for fun character interactions and a very creative streak … that could’ve flourished better had he not been in Jump, but I digress).
Bob
April 8, 2019 at 1:08 am“But here you’ve got both guys tutoring five girls”
It’s only 3.
Arabesque
April 8, 2019 at 5:48 amWell, really he tutors 2 girls, one kinda jumped in cause she has her puppy crush (0.5), another is kind of a mixture(0.25), and one is “tutoring” him (-1).
So, 1.75 girls in total, in harem maths.
Arabesque
April 8, 2019 at 6:02 amI thought the episode was much better than I initially thought when I first watched the PV for the series. Everything else “clicked” for me. Animation was on point, sound design very good, comedic timing very well done, the OST fitting and the cast sounding as good as they do.
The colours for the characters remains ugly as butt tho. It might make them more “pronounced” or whatever, but it just looks ugly on the eyes.
I like We Never Learn a lot, so I was happy with how this episode turned out. And while the point about it and Quintuplets pretty much sharing the same core idea, at least the love interests here are more likable and not have design as interchangeable as dress up dolls.