English Dub Review: Love Flops “People Don’t Like It If You’re Early, But They Hate It If You’re Late Too”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Asahi awakens in what seems to be a different world, with no one at his school knowing anything about any of the girls he lived with. He’s then approached by Yoshino Feynman, a scientist who reveals to him that what has felt like months was actually only a day or so, as well as that every person he met at the start of the series, including all of the girls he lived with, were only parts of a simulation, testing the ability of AI to learn how to love. However, something seemed to go wrong within the experiment, causing most of the girls to be “logged out”, and eventually Asahi himself. Asahi resists this at first, but as he is told this, he remembers his real childhood friend, Ai, whose father apparently used her for a risky experiment. He runs out of the building and to a grave, Ai’s grave, revealing she died. Later, Aoi’s face starts appearing on screens all over the city.

OUR TAKE

Harem rom-coms are like onions, they all have layers. In this case, the onion layers are peeling away to reveal that the past seven episodes…just didn’t actually happen. It’s all been in a simulation for the sake of SCIENCE, specifically to further advance artificial intelligence, and not in the way that has it make horrific or bland looking aggregations of real art that also have impossible hands. After finally getting a good look at this world, we learn that AI apparently play a major part in daily societal functions, though in what way is not made exactly clear. It’s just to facilitate that they would have these sorts of experiments like putting someone in a harem anime simulation, though I feel like that’s not the only way they could’ve gone through with it. But yeah, we’ve ripped the band-aid off and shown that the unrealistic and overly stylized world of the first half of the series was actually not real and now Asahi must grapple with the reality he has found himself back in! What an unexpected twist in the story! Surely I didn’t see this coming! Shouldn’t I be more surprised by this shocking turn of events?!

Well, as mentioned and hinted at several times before, I got spoiled on this big twist back when this series was first coming out in Fall 2022 and people were talking about, and I had no idea at the time that I would be covering the dub of this so I didn’t feel the need to protect myself from spoilers. But there’s also another reason that this just isn’t landing with me as much as it could, which is that the simulation and the “real” world feel a bit too similar, at least in terms of heightened reality. The simulation is a bit more out there since it has Kung Fu assassins and magical girls, but retreating that to a significantly more technologically advanced world seems like it’s just switching out one level of faux for another. If they REALLY wanted to take a big swing, they could probably have the real world look and feel totally different, with Asahi being a butt ugly bastard who signed up for a harem simulation experiment because literally no one likes him. But instead, he still has a childhood friend (who is dead?) and now a yandere computer program after him, and we’ll see where that goes in the remaining third of this series. In the meantime, how about you all go play a little indie game called Doki Doki Literature Club? No reason, just suddenly giving gamer recommendations now.