English Dub Review: Watari-kun’s XX Is About to Collapse “Honest Feelings; The One I Need”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Umezawa takes one last swing at getting Naoto’s love, and Naoto learns more about Satsuki’s life right before they met.

OUR TAKE

It turns out Watari-kun’s XX Is About to Collapse was also a victim of Crunchyroll’s weird and stupid subtitle change over last week, as we now get a double stuffing of episodes to…well, I can’t honestly say enjoy, but…acknowledge? I suppose that counts. With Ishihara definitively out of the running of this two horse race, the show has decided to remind us “oh yeah, there was that pink haired girl who also thought she was involved in this!” Yeah yeah, I know she was mainly there for comedy, but I haven’t been laughing, so I’m more than happy to see the show give her a send off. At least it was a somewhat heartfelt one as she got to confess her feelings to Naoto and leave the show on a more or less good note with him, and that’s all she wrote for Umezawa. The main focus now is basically Naoto wooing Satsuki, who I guess is happy to be on the opposite end of this exchange after being more than aggressive about this over the past twenty episodes. Like I know the show WANTS me to see this as her discarding the blunt forwardness that led her to basically commit assault multiple times, but none of that ever really got addressed or worked on beyond just…stopping that. It just kind of lays bare how this show views assault as something that, when done by a girl, can only be interpreted as harmless and sexy and something that guys should look past.

Yeah, I’m gonna be yammering about this for the remainder of the show, so get used to it. We do seem to get a bit of an explanation for Satsuki’s behavior, as she initially pulls away from Naoto’s advances at one point before basically jumping him like the old days the next time she sees him. And apparently Satsuki got a call from her foster mother that because her foster brother (the other Naoto) is getting married, she doesn’t need to worry about inheriting the inn…which causes her to spiral and seek affection and being needed from Naoto. So I guess all of that “I don’t mind being a mistress and you can use me however you need” was also a part of that? Yeah, it definitely wasn’t the author trying to play out his sexual fantasies, not at all. But whatever, these two are closer to being a better couple, which you would think meant that show was just about over, but we still have four more episodes for some ungodly reason.