English Dub Review: My First Girlfriend Is a Gal “My First Fight”

Can it be? Are girlfriend and boyfriend actually acting as such? …No.

It honestly feels like forever since I’ve watched a high school romance that actually evolved naturally and displayed natural emotion. The last one that I simply adored was in Ore Monogatari!! (My Love Story!!) The relationship between two awkward teens felt simply sweet, the misunderstandings and fights felt genuine and apart from one afro asshat there friends weren’t a bunch terrible people. AND NO ONE WAS A PEDOPHILE.

OVERVIEW
But on to important things today, Yukana and Junichi have their first fight when the two run into one of Yukana’s old classmates, Dai Mitarai. Now Junichi being Junichi becomes a depressed mess and starts spouting his self-deprecating complaining to Yukana, questioning why she would want to be with him when guys like Dai are so much better than him. Yukana then runs off hurt by Junichi and without answering his question and for the rest of the episode Junichi’s friends actually try and help bring up his spirits. Not by being helpful of course, but by helping perpetuate his negative attitude about himself which Yukana clearly detested. Truly Junichi picked the best crew to have as his friends.

I am feeling so on the fence with this episode. It is finally getting around to the actually interesting aspect of a show called My First Girlfriend is a Gal. The freaking gal. Definitely, this fight could have opened up Yukana and Junichi to know and learn more about one another as, to be frank, Junichi doesn’t know crap about Yukana. We as the audience don’t know anything about her from this anime. We get glimpses of her innocent nature and her carefree happy attitude but thanks to the show’s focus on three certain individuals we missed out on fleshing out our main gal.

It’s a crying shame as I feel Yukana is a really nice character and her teasing romantic nature could make her a wonderful romantic antagonistic to the awkward Junichi. But like with Touya from In Another World With My Smartphone, the show is petrified to show Yukana in an unfavorable light to help us see why she feels the way she feels. Yukana becomes just an ideal that Junichi pines for firstly physically and then inexplicably for a more personal reason. I can’t really say their chemistry has improved over the show as the two have felt rather disconnected from each other. I excuse that disconnect when Junichi is wrestling with the problems brought in by Ranko, Nene, and Yui as that helps reflect Yukana’s personality so we see those good traits from her.

However, I can’t get past how much the show has wasted our time with Junichi’s friends. Their insistent callbacks to pedo friend’s pedophilic efforts, Shinpei’s blunt and perverted misunderstanding of relationships, Keigo’s… practically undescriptive character, all of that built to nothing that involves Yukana and Junichi. This fight should have happened 5 episodes ago to help kickstart their relationship into something beyond the physical. Because just like the vapid Junichi the series could only see skin deep.

OUR TAKE

I do like the aspect of this episode where it involved the gals. They were fleshing out the relationship of Yukana and Junichi while showing an angle to each of their characters that made them more dynamic to the narrative. If the show was about this then it would have been a fairly decent romance anime. But it wasn’t about that, was it? No, just like Junichi in the first episode, My First Girlfriend Is a Gal is about just the bare minimum tits and ass and all this episode shows is that some writer on the team desperately wanted this to be more. At least for the anime though this was too little too late.