You know my motto, don’t bury the headline. The premiere of Make Heroine ga Oosugiru! was really good. Like, startlingly good. On multiple levels. I expected to love the character designs, because those are by Imigi Muru and he’s one of my favorite artists in manga. He illustrates the light novels (I know) Makeine is based on, and the kids he conceives are just so gorgeously expressive. I lament that he seems to have lost interest (at least I haven’t seen a new chapter in months) in Konobi, which is so great partly because he’s the writer as well as the artist. But more Imigi is never a bad thing.
As for the direction and other aspects of the production, I had an inkling they’d be good because the previews were pretty striking. But this A-1 production doesn’t have huge names behind it, so the extent to which this premiere was visually stunning (including the ED) caught me off guard. Most of all, though, I really didn’t expect to like the story and cast as much as I did. I know nothing about Amamori Takibi, the novelist (this is his first series). But I can only be blunt – while I can’t absolutely say “if he were good, he wouldn’t be writing light novels in the 2020s”, my personal experience gets us pretty close to that.
Still – here we are. The writing here was pretty darn sharp, and the characters had some real snap to them (I vehemently argue that Imigi’s magic is part of that). I have to keep my enthusiasm in check, because a good start for a LN adaptation is not a complete unicorn but finding one that can keep the pot on the boil beyond that is. My full expectation is that Makeine will flame out after a few episodes at most, because that’s what happens with almost all LNs which grab me with their opening salvos. But hope springs eternal.
Even by the standards of the LN anime that I start out liking, this one was above-average. The protagonist is a high schooler named Nukumizu Kazuhiko (Umeda Shuuichirou, as noted earlier something of a seiyuu it boy). He’s a bit of a loner who loves romance LNs and the drink bar (though all teens love the drink bar, to be fair). One day at the family restaurant he sees a couple of classmates having an argument a few tables down. This is Yanami Anna (Tohno Hikaru) and Hakamada Sousuke (Ohsaka Ryouta, wow). They’re childhood friends, and Anna is urging Sousuke to be with someone named Karen (even though she’s in love with him herself).
Eventually Sousuke bolts to do just that, and Kazuhiko spots Anna stealing an indirect kiss (“So desperate!”) from his straw. Eventually she latches on to him to vent, orders ¥3000 worth of food and sticks him with the tab. Thus begins a rather unlikely friendship, if you can call it that. Mostly Anna bitches to Kazuhiko about Karen and Sousuke (who keep inviting her along to third wheel, which she feels she can’t decline). He insists she pay him back, she obviously can’t, and eventually talks him into accepting daily bentos until the bill is paid off. Anyone who doesn’t see that turning out badly for him hasn’t been paying attention.
Needless to say, justice for osananajimi is the theme here. To Anna there are only two types of girls – childhood friends and homewreckers. She has a little circle of comrades it seems, similarly jilted girls from the title. For his part Kazuhiko is a rather laconic passenger on Anna’s loser express, though he does start to find himself being drawn to her. Frankly it’s not as if his social life is so wonderful that it’s any great sacrifice to have Anna intrude on his time, and she naturally starts to see him as a confidante since he mostly just takes her diatribes in impassively.
Does that have staying power, especially as the harem elements inevitably kick in? That’s the question, Jimmy – as always with LN adaptations. But for one week at least I really enjoyed the Makeine experience. I like the two leads even if Anna is annoying, and no one really grated on me (even the little sister was OK, shockingly) except maybe the dojikko teacher. And the little gags like the Lit Club president hiding BL in the Dazai and Mishima section mostly worked. Plus, what’s with the girls uniforms all having four bow ties? That was random enough to really make me laugh (I’m assuming Imigi deserves the credit for that).
L0ken
July 14, 2024 at 10:45 pmMakeine is actually much closer to Slice of Life then romcom or even harem, so those elements shouldn’t be present at least in this season. There is minimal romance with MC and he is mostly there to be observer and help losers with venting their frustration and cope with their rejections. So for those who is interested it should a fun watch, especially since production values are really strong.
Guy Thompson
July 15, 2024 at 8:10 amI have a rather interesting story with this one. I never knew the light novel existed but accidentally bumped into a manga version on one of the manga fan translation websites. I read several chapters quite late at night before sleep and became intrigued by the unusual premise. Next day I wanted to read the rest but looks like I used Incognito mode in the browser by mistake and couldn’t find the URL in browser history. I forgot the name of it too and only remembered the heroine decided to pay her debt to MC with bento lunches. I looked hard at the website but it was totally lost in the flow of other manga updates. I even tried to Google the description of the plot in several ways, but only irrelevant and obscene results turned out haha. After all I decided that I was just daydreaming and the thing never existed in the first place. Could you imagine my surprise after watching this episode just as a matter of curiosity and without reading the plot? But yeah, I agree, it was better that I expected.
Nicc
July 17, 2024 at 2:14 pmBefore I get started, yes, about the four bowties. I must call out the sartorial sin of the girls wearing four bowties with their uniforms. That probably annoyed me more than it should have, but there’s just no reason at all to be wearing that many bowties at once. For some reason, I think that’s setting up one of the later girls wearing six bowties or such.
Alright, I got that out of my system. The summer of love continues with one more rom-com in a very crowded pile. Besides the dreadful fashion sense, I enjoyed this episode more than I expected and came into it blind. We’ve got our MC, Nukumizu Kazuhiko, an ordinary high school boy with a love for reading romance. And, yes, the freestyle soda fountain is one of humankind’s greatest inventions. Make a normal drink or a Frankenstein creature of a beverage, it’s up to you. At the family restaurant, he spots a scene that’s ripped out of a romance LN. He sees two fellow classmates (Yanami Anna and Hakamada Sousuke) arguing and they happen to be childhood friends. Yep, Anna encourages Sousuke go be with Karen, who’s a transfer student, even though she’s in love with Sousuke. Yep, we’ve seen this scenario before too.
Sousuke runs off to find Karen, but Anna is still thirsty, in more ways than one. She goes for the indirect kiss from Sousuke’s unfinished beverage and makes eye contact with Kuzuhiko. Uh-oh. Yep, an odd friendship forms from there, though part of it is transactional as Anna intends to pay off the food that she ordered that day with bentos for Kuzuhiko. She even gets cover for making two bentos because her mom thinks he’s making one for Sousuke.
Right, he spends lunch listening to her rants about Karen and Sousuke. She wants to be a third wheel (So they won’t do lovey-dovey stuff), but at the same time she also doesn’t (She doesn’t want to watch them do lovey-dovey stuff). We meet some other characters too including his little sister and then another student named Lemon, who seems set up to be the second “losing” heroine. Anna got burned by the transfer student “homewrecker” while Lemon is wary of the cram school “homewrecker”. We’re also introduced to the Literature Club members that Kuzuhiko is a member of. It sounds like he’ll have to spend some time there as the student council is cracking down on inactive clubs, which looks like it’ll include one of the heroines. The writing is sharp, and the artwork and animation is crisp. There was a lot to like in this premier episode, including an improvised bento box. If this keeps up, I can almost forgive the four bowties.
Brian Guy
July 17, 2024 at 5:57 pm“Thus begins a rather unlikely friendship, if you can call it that.”
Deleted
Where you were impressed by the visuals (rightfully so), I found the soundscape even more striking; in what largely takes the general form (of not the normal content) of a romcom, the amount of stark silence and pauses deployed is pretty aggressive. Gemai Seikatsu doing that isn’t surprising given its dramedy content, but going naturalistic here is a big gamble and it pays off.
nadavu
July 20, 2024 at 3:40 pmHi Brian. I know you mean well, but please consider that everytime someone displays prior knowledge of events – even vaguely – it ruins the fun for the rest of us. Thanks.
nadavu
July 20, 2024 at 3:36 pmproduction levels are off the charts. I had strong Shinkai vibes in the first few minutes – obviously not content-wise, but the onslaught of gorgeous images flickering faster than they can be appreciated was very 5cm/s-ish
FacelessGrunt
September 11, 2024 at 7:59 amHey Enzo, your continued coverage of this show eventually made me watch it. I was more then pleasantly surprised (writing, acting, visuals, and everything else you described better then I can currently manage)
Thanks for bringing this show to my attention!
Guardian Enzo
September 11, 2024 at 2:59 pmThat’s why I do this, more or less!