And the rest of that episode suddenly becomes incredibly self aware. Essentially the scene boils down to Nana (Nanashina) forcefully kissing Serinuma in his room on his bed. For example, there’s a scene in episode 8 of Kiss Him, Not Me with Nozomu Nanashima that get’s pretty intense and it comes right out of nowhere. I don’t mean dark as in murder, blood guts and gore but… Junko doesn’t shy away from some uncomfortable scenes. It’s true that not all her work has self aware humour, but all her work seems to have this underlying realism that might come off as kind of dark. Due to this, some people may find the majority of the love interests to be unlikable.Īnother note to this being Junko’s work is the realistic moments and self aware humour. Unfortunately, this means the majority of the love interests in Kiss Him Not Me can come off as conniving, self serving and shallow. You might say that these characters are problematic, but the thing with that term is that everything is problematic in one way or another. The thing is, people are complex, and no one is perfect. This might turn some people off, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad. They can be rude and selfish, all of them. The characters are complex… but they’re also kind of assholes in one way or another.Įach of these characters, from Serinuma herself to all of her suitors including Mutsumi and Nishina are flawed. (I mean, aside from the art style which is more evident in the manga than in the anime it’s pretty obvious.) Junko has this knack for creating what I find to be relatively realistic characters in her BL manga and that translates here as well. Here is where you can really tell that this is Junko’s work. This may have been the creator’s way of hiding the fact that Nishina was a potential suitor from the audience as she doesn’t appear until a much later episode, but it’s hard to tell. Screenshot of the opening credits “dance” sequence. Nishina does not get a scene like this.Īsuma Mutsumi and Kae Serinuma. Though it is odd that she doesn’t appear extensively in the opening and in the same way the other guys do, like in the scenes were all the guys are shown “dancing” with Serinuma. She states at one point that she herself is interested in Serinuma and wants to be taken seriously as a love interest. She’s unapologetically in love with Serinuma much like the other characters. You don’t normally see mixed sex or gender harems so this was different. As a comedy I think it works well, I actually laughed at quite a few jokes here and there.Īnother thing about this anime is that there’s a female suitor amongst all of the guys. And it sticks to some tropes while subverting others. It pokes a lot of fun at the BL and shoujo romance genres which is quite amusing. The anime is far more reliant on comedy than romance, though both play a part in the story. Her stylization comes off much better in the manga, though I don’t see this as a problem as everything else about the animation is okay.
![kiss him not me characters kiss him not me characters](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/71/67/45/716745d1b7fc9e3279ec0cdd050e8011.png)
I think it portrays Junko’s art style as good as it can. So, what’s good about this anime? Well, there’s a fair bit. To clarify, I’m mostly going to be talking about the anime here because I haven’t really read the manga to completion and I can’t say much for how well it follows the manga’s storyline. But just when I started thinking the show wasn’t so bad or that I was reading too much into something that should be light hearted, one of the male characters forcibly came on to the girl and then she forgave him.From left to right: Nozomu Nanashima (Nana), Shima Nishina, Hayato Shinomiya, Asuma Mutsumi and Yusuke Igarashi. Parts of it actually were kind of funny and the rest was kind of just easy viewing. So the question would be why I watched it at all and I’m still not sure what the answer is other than curiosity except that, no matter how much I hated what the characters were doing, I didn’t hate the show. And of course there’s the girl who also wants to date Kae and the oblvious guy’s older brother for some reason. At least they are horrible in their own ways but even then the only real distinguishing characteristics of the guys are nice, angry, oblivious, and younger. They are all horrible, self-absorbed people who are incredibly shallow and it drove me crazy (again there’s one kind of exception but even then he’s pretty oblivious and in his own little world most of the time). Okay, I have issues with the premise and the characters.