English Dub Review: Convenience Store Boy Friends “October”

Convenience Store Boy Friends tries out a tired trope and thinks we won’t notice.


Overview (Spoilers Below):

This episode highlighted a lot of the issues with this show; mainly the refusal to focus on the main cast. It tries to juggle several different relationships and expects the audience to care about all of them. It attempts to put several relationships or potential relationships on the same level as the main characters, and there’s really no need for that. The most important duos are Mashiki and Mishima and Honda and Mami, and that should be it. At the end of the day, the audience isn’t going to care about the others, so there’s no reason for whole episodes to focus on what should be side romances. Following the cliffhanger last episode, and the revelation that Mashiki might not be as comfortable with Mishima as we thought, the episode should have absolutely been focused on them. Instead, we got Kisaki and Nakajima.

I am really, really tired of the casual incest trope in anime. This time we get a focus on. It’s not subtle at all– even Sakurakouji admits that the two of them are basically a couple. While it’s not a good move narratively at all to include yet another couple and their potential problems, that doesn’t change the fact that Nakajima and Kisaki are related. Nakajima’s main struggle isn’t just that he’s going to be passing on his title of student council president, but that he also has feelings for his little sister. Worse off, the narrative thinks that we’re supposed to cheer them on. Because incest is fine, apparently, and we should be cheering on love in any form.

If they were childhood friends, their story wouldn’t be a problem at all, but they just had to be siblings. It could have been about how Kisaki looks up to her older brother and realizes that she needs to grow up and find her own identity. But nope, romance, because that’s all this show is about. Anime these days wants to milk the ‘siblings in love’ trope with all its might, without thinking that maybe it’s not something to be celebrated. It’s not familial love either, it’s romantic love.  And are meant to be compared on the same level to every other couple in the show, and we’re supposed to be okay with that. We’re supposed to root for them.

I don’t buy it.

Score
4.0/10