English Dub Review: Watari-kun’s XX Is About to Collapse “Small Lies”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Naoto convinces his aunt to let him and his sister stay at her house after a misunderstanding, then tries having a study session with student rep Ishihara, but is held back by his sister Suzushiro and later by a cold he got from being around Satsuki.

OUR TAKE

Oh, this is gonna be one of THOSE shows, isn’t it. The kind of show seems to be dipping into the author’s own strange and niche fetish with a thinly veiled excuse of “it’s for the story!” draped over. Because I can’t really think of an explanation for why we needed to see Naoto’s aunt, who looks basically like a child, fully nude from multiple angles for the scene where Naoto begs her to let him stay. The only reason for this being, by the way, that Satsuki just started ripping her clothes off in broad daylight and he fell over on top of her trying to stop her. It’s this level of contrived situation for the sake of titillation that we likely have to look forward to for the rest of this season and…I’m not super looking forward to it, if I’m being honest. So far, it looks like the story is meant to be pushing Naoto towards Satsuki, since she’s following him around all the time, even breaking into his house, wants to get close to him both physically and emotionally, but also seems to have completely forgotten the idea of boundaries…even though she distanced herself from Naota for about six years without so much as a word to him, at least from the info we have about that time so far.

Satsuki does provide a bit of insight about Naoto and his difficulties making friends at school though, mainly that he tends to use the excuse of taking care of his sister a lot. And while it’s shown in this and last week’s episode that his sister Suzushiro is pretty clingy after their parents died, Naoto is also not really giving himself a chance to experience his youth while he’s taking care of her. We also learn from Naoto that his parents apparently were star-crossed, meaning that neither of their parents approved of their relationship for some unspecified reason, and thus when they died, none of their blood relatives wanted anything to do with their orphaned kids. Even Tamayo, their brother’s sister, still has them on thin ice and doesn’t want to hear a word about her brother. There’s a lot there that we may still uncover about this weird family situation, but this episode ends on Satsuki being forced under the sheets while Naoto has a cold to hide from Ishihara, so we’ll see how that resolves next week.