English Dub Season Review: Love Stage Season One

BL gonna BL.

Our Take:

Love Stage depicts a love story between two young boys; Izumi, an otaku who is also part of a lucrative show business family, and Ryoma, a large up-and-coming actor. The two originally met for a bridal commercial when they were children, and have to repurpose their roles for the commercial’s 10th anniversary.

Izumi is admittedly a frustrating character because he’s both very reasonable and both not reasonable. Thanks to being part of an acting job gone wrong as a child, Izumi is extremely traumatized by the event and doesn’t want to start acting again. Despite the fact that his entire family is part of show business and he could have a lucrative career himself, his childhood trauma prevents him from doing so. At the same time, there’s no alternative career that he has laid out, so he spends his days unsure of what to do with his life. He does like anime, especially magical girl anime, but his family sees this as a largely dead-end career, and that he’s just being stubborn and dragging his feet from the inevitable. This is pretty understandable because Izumi is a teenager, he’s lost and frustrated, and he’s constantly being told that the best option for him to do is go back to the thing that traumatized him. His rebellion and resistance towards wanting to go into acting make a lot of sense, and that he’d cling to something that brings him joy instead of something that gives him pain. Being forced into a career that young is also incredibly jarring for someone who’s lost his way in life.

At the same time, Izumi is hard to deal with in the latter half of the show because it becomes increasingly clear that he’s put no thought into his future at all, and is just using being a mangaka as a deflecting tool. He knows the basics of manga creation, such as how to construct pages and use screentones, but he doesn’t pace himself or seem to be aware of just how much hard work being a mangaka is. It doesn’t seem like he’s putting much work into learning how to hone his talent- putting most of his effort into consuming existing series than creating his own. While that’s fine for a fan, to be a creator you have to balance them both, and it feels like Izumi making manga is more of an impulse decision- not so he can forge a career path, but so he can meet his favorite mangaka. I felt very torn between Izumi feeling very relatable and wanting to shake him by the shoulders because of how irresponsible he is.

As for Ryoma, the mistaken identity thing is a fun thing but gets over fast, and the majority of the series is his puppy love for Izumi. This is all fine, because he’s obviously very smitten, and will even do some wild things. Has Ryoma ever had a normal friendship, because he doesn’t seem to be very aware of regular social norms such as don’t posture wildly and don’t text people 80 times during a school day? Sometimes Ryoma behaves more like a stalker than a lover, and while this is a gag series, it’s sometimes hard to tell what’s supposed to be a joke and what isn’t. During some of his better moments, Ryoma is fairly sincere- he helps Izumi finish his manga on time, lets him crash at his place when Izumi is frustrated, and even goes out of his way to get an autograph from Izumi’s favorite mangaka to cheer him up about his future prospects. All of these are genuinely good.

Unfortunately, this is still a BL anime, and very, unfortunately, falls nose-deep into some pretty gross BL tropes. Stuff like Ryoma being confused about his sexuality and his budding feelings towards Izumi, but he assaults Izumi twice because that’s love I guess. A lot of the near-sex scenes felt really uncomfortable in this regard because it’s the usual BL non-consent played as something that increases the romantic bond between the two rather than decreases it. Of course, this isn’t a specific thing to this series, but something that plagues BL as a whole- since very early on is sexual assault played for laughs or as an indicator of love, just BL being BL. I guess since finding out that the original manga wasn’t that old, having a run in 2010, I thought things would be slightly better. Evidently not. While this didn’t really detract from the series, as I was expecting it to pop up, it’s something that makes me sigh deeply. Shouldn’t we know better by now? I guess not. The series would have been way more effective without the assault elements, to tell the truth.

As a result, it’s a really hard task to judge Ryoma by his character. He seems like an okay guy, but then he forces himself on Izumi a lot, which kind of ruins any assessment of romantic chemistry that I can give them. Then again it is (unfortunately) a genre staple. Frustrating.

I’d say it’s alright, it’s a genuinely funny show at times, but it is a BL at the end of the day.