English Dub Review: Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines “Professional Childhood Friend Yanami Anna’s Style of Losing”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kazuhiko Nukumizu witnesses the end of a high school romance drama happen right in front of him, leading to him suddenly become closer to popular girl Anna Yanami and others in her situation.

OUR TAKE

The “childhood friend” trope and character archetype is basically a staple of the high school romantic comedy anime genre, though more often than not it’s to give a love triangle a character who will lose. This isn’t always the case, and it’s probably less common now than it ever has been, but typically the male lead has a female friend he has known since childhood who he has never considered as a potential romantic partner for whatever reason, who is then spurred to pursue him for aggressively when he meets the MAIN love interest of that story. The cliche way of handling this is that she eventually moves aside and lets the protagonist begin his relationship with his love interest so the story can end on a happy ending, if not necessarily hers. Makeine is not the first story to give us a different angle on this character’s story, but it sure knows how to kick it off from a pretty funny place, as Kazuhiko basically witnesses a scene that feels like it came from the end of different story when he sees Anna essentially surrender to her own rival for the boy she likes. But this is just the first episode, so there’s obviously more to go from here.

Of course, there are almost as many high school romcom subversion anime as there are ones that are played straight nowadays, so this one seems like it’s leaning towards the loner Kazuhiko who pretends he’s above all the dating nonsense ending up with Anna who is feeling heartbreak from losing the one she thought she would initially be with. I guess the question now is how well they get these two to feel like a good enough couple (whether that be romantically or as friends) when we get there. Personally, I’m not all that crazy about Kazuhiko at the moment, if only because I’ve seen better and more interesting versions of this type of character in other shows (Oregairu, as an example), so I’m more interested in seeing what they decide to do with these tropes as opposed to whether or not they’re referencing cliches. But the designs are cute and the animation looks pretty nice, so that’s probably going to keep me at least a bit interested for a little bit. And by “a little bit” I think maybe around the first three or four episodes, so they better hurry up and hit something else for me to focus on by then.