English Dub Season Review: Masamune-Kun’s Revenge Season One

What starts as a romantic comedy filled with terrible, shallow, rich kids transforms into beautiful story of loving others sacrificially… Starring terrible, shallow, rich kids.

Spoilers Below

Masamune Makabe is a man on a mission. As a young boy, his heart was ripped out by a beautiful young girl and stomped on because he was fat. Now he’s in high school, and he’s put himself through an insane regiment of diet and exercise to become the beefcake every shoujo dreams of. He doesn’t look anything like the boy of the past. His goal? Capture the love of Aki Adagaki, the girl who dumped him, and give her the same treatment. With the help of Yoshino Koiwai, Aki’s personal servant, he plays out every trope ever seen from romance novels, and fails his way upward. You end up rooting for him early on because this Aki is a stone-cold ice princess out to destroy the ego of every man who asks her out.

Two hiccups occur in his plan. One is Neko Fujinomiya, a sweet and beautiful girl with a chronic, possibly fatal illness and no underwear. She has her own heart set on winning Masamune as her man for reasons she keeps entirely to herself. The other problem is Kanetsugu Gasou, a chubby, slightly effeminate boy posing as a dead ringer for the Masamune of the past! He has all the paperwork in order and intends to marry Aki himself for nefarious reasons. Mixed it up with a tomboy, a girly-boy, three possibly lesbians devoted to keeping Aki single, and a man-hating secretary, and you have a good amount of humor building up a head of steam.

First, I have to admit, my initial feelings on this show were rather poor. The quality of art, animation, and voice acting was good enough to keep it in a good rating, but romcoms are not normally my thing. Further, the shallow, selfish, and catty behavior of all these privileged, snobbish kids was enough to make me want to reach through the screen and slap somebody every scene change. I know for a fact, however, that this is what the writer was going for. To make all of these characters so despicable that you can’t help but want Masamune’s horrible plan to come to fruition. Slowly, however, as new characters arrive and explain their part in the backstory, we begin to see the real truth. Yes, these characters are petty and vain. They take joy in destroying other people in a way that borders on the events of  13 Reasons Why. However, there is not just a single reason why these ugly-spirited children have become this way. The repeated actions of multiple individuals have slowly altered the courses of their lives, and it will take repeated actions to wear down the plaque of nastiness. For example and spoilers, Aki’s ice princess bit was begun because she thought Masamune had left HER, cultivated and taught by her father’s secretary as a revenge for being jilted so many times by men, and encouraged by her classmates as revenge for boys who treated them poorly. Though Aki still bears responsibility for her actions, she is what she is because of the spite of others using her as a vessel for misguided, random acts of vengeance that only perpetuates a cycle of broken hearts and bullying.

In the long run, this is a show about how your actions can cause devastation in the lives of people you have never even met, and can emotionally cripple the people around you. Neko is a pure, gentle soul who pretends that she’s faking her illness so that people won’t treat her differently, but otherwise, she treats everyone with love and kindness. Most of the characters don’t trust any of her motives because they are so used to back-stabbing and game-playing that they can’t trust anyone, much less someone who comes off as nice.

The art and voice acting are excellent throughout, with subtle nuances that betray the true feelings of each character, despite the obvious faces that they put forward. While we do get to hear what some characters are thinking, especially Masamune, the best of the show is in its subtext. Animation for shows like this doesn’t have to be extravagant. Without action sequences, they can get away with a lot of shortcuts. This show, for the most part, eschews that. The animators took care to think about what messages they were getting across in each shot, and animated them thoughtfully. Combined with great dubbing direction, you will find yourself thinking that this anime was made in English, especially from the extreme closeups. I give this show eight misguided revenge plots out of ten and will be looking forward to the next season, which should be recommendation enough.