English Dub Review: Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister “Changing Clothes, Changing Hearts”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Uryu begins attending a school that was recently girls only, and unfortunately it’s Yuna’s.

OUR TAKE

Let me tell you something: I have seen a lot of harem comedies. Like a LOT a lot. I have seen so many I could write a collection of far too detailed essays about shit that no healthy brained person would ever spare more than two seconds thought on. It takes up far too much brain space what the difference between a tsundere, a yandere, and a kuudere is but I am more likely to remember that on my deathbed than the face of my potential children. And I say this simultaneously with no shame whatsoever and so much shame that it could power the western seaboard for a week. So, dear reader, believe me when I say that this episode is so made up of harem anime cliches that even though the manga for this was published before generative AI as we knew it was a thing, I could be convinced it was written by it if I didn’t know better. We have the first boy at a formerly co-ed school, the girls all flocking to him, him living with one of them who wants to keep it a secret, the making of bento boxes, etc, etc, et cetera.

Now, please do not misinterpret my frustrations here. Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister was very much upfront about its intentions to be a conveyor belt harem show from the beginning, so I am not going to sit here and pretend that it was some brilliant masterwork of fiction prior to this episode. But harem romcoms are a genre like any other, and like any other, there are good ones and bad ones, and the difference between them is usually that the good ones know how to use expected tropes to make for interesting stories about interesting people, which it seemed like they were doing up until now. However, I simply do not see the advantage in changing the setting to a school, making Uryu the only boy there (and now that I think about it, the only teenage boy we’ve met so far in this show) or having this weird secret to keep for Yuna’s sake. Oh yeah, and then there’s the childhood friend who, spoiler for much later in the story that this season is not gonna adapt, she’s going to be a problem later. Anyway, crap episode, hopefully not an indication of what’s to come, but oh well.