English Dub Season Review: Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms Season One

Overview:

Mona Kawai is used to getting her way. She’s always been the queen bee, and everyone always loves her. But when Medaka Kuroiwa joins their class, she might have finally met her match. He wants to become a monk one day, and her usual antics don’t get him in the same way they do everyone else. Rom-com hijinks ensue!

Our Take:

It’s been a while since I’ve gushed about anything on the technical side of things. But I have to talk about Megan Shipman, who voices Mona. Most might recognize her as the voice of Anya Forger from Spy x Family, but I enjoyed her performance in this a lot. Mona is from Osaka, and in most anime, when someone is from that area, they usually talk in a southern accent. The only problem is that Mona has an image to maintain, and she can’t be seen talking “weird”. Whenever she’s thinking things, though, we get to hear her accent. Megan does a great job of shifting between the two different voices for the same character, and I thought she deserved a shout-out.

That is where most of the positivity for this show ends for me, unfortunately. I read the manga for a decent amount of time, but there are hundreds of chapters now. I bring that up because this falls into the same trap a lot of romance anime and manga fall into: little to no progress with the romance. I used to think this was because a romance anime can’t do well once the main characters get together. But a show like Horimiya came along and proved that wrong, so now I don’t think there’s an excuse.

I’m slightly hopeful for the second season, though, because the last two episodes were great. Once Mona stopped trying to trip Medaka up and came to realize she was in love, it got a lot better. Once she started to have honest conversations with him, I enjoyed it. Sure, there was still some ecchi stuff, but that’s never going to go away. I hope season two follows in the footsteps of the end of season one and doesn’t repeat its mistakes.