English Dub Review: Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? “Operation: Koharu is a First-Year Student – Conclusion”

 

Overview

Things seem to be going pretty swimmingly between Koharu and Shoma, but Keiki still needs to push them together. He decides that the best way to do this would be to take them on a double-date. He takes them bowling, where they bond even more than before.

As her and Shoma become closer, Koharu decides on her own accord to tell him the truth, that she’s actually a year older than him. When they meet up, Koharu describes how they technically met a year ago: when he fetched her wind-blown hat out of a tree. She confesses her secret, and that she’s in love with him. He sadly declines, saying that he’s only into younger girls.

Keiki witnesses this and later gives Shoma a moral beat-down for rejecting Koharu because of his “younger girls” thing. He then finds Koharu crying in the astronomy lab, and makes fun of him with her to cheer her up. Shoma overhears and apologizes to Koharu, deciding that he needs to straighten up his priorities. He tells her that he wants to start out as friends, but she accuses him of “keeping her in limbo,” like a true dirt bag. This is teasing, though, and she forgives him despite his “lame, weak-ass” excuses and says she’d like to be friends.

…And then he sees her stalker shrine of him.

Our Take

Just because a show is self-aware about the dumb anime tropes it’s using, doesn’t mean that absolves it of the fact that it’s still using them. However, this show (or, at least, its English dub) is pretty satirical, and — like all good satire comedy — all the bad things used within it build up to make a good point. This episode is an example of just that.

Shoma is into “loli” girls (as stated in the original text of the show.) Both the sub and dub make it clear that this is pretty disgusting, but the English dub uses Keiki’s internal narration as a comical judgement on him. The entire scene where Keiki and Koharu are ripping into Shoma — and condemning people who like lolis/”younger girls” — isn’t just stating the obvious for brownie points. It leads Shoma to question himself, leading to a character development where he looks inside himself and says, “Wow, yeah, that is pretty messed up. I have to change.”

The dub usually does a way better job of making this anime more satirical, but the original Japanese version doesn’t shy away from the main message of this episode, either.

Anyway, so many of Koharu’s English voice lines were golden during this scene. Her soft-pitched voice winds up working to her advantage, because hearing her curse so much in that voice is chuckle worthy. Despite her questionable affinity for photography (which hopefully she’ll face reparations for in the next episode) she’s a genuinely good character — one of the only ones that manages to sail past the “kinky weirdo” trope and be someone the audience can genuinely sympathize with. Who would have guessed?