I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day — Episode 1

Content Warnings: Blood; murder; character death.

What’s it about? At a secret academy where orphans are turned into weapons, death is routine and grieving is forbidden. So when Sheena, a 14-year-old who questions why this life even exists, meets Mimi, her whole world changes as she finally finds someone to help her survive the brutality of a life that eats away at her humanity every day.

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We open on a rainy day in a forest. A girl in a school uniform lays dying, blood turning the ground around her red. An enemy approaches, wand in hand—and with a single burst of radiant purple magic, she dies.

This is the cruel fate of the human weapons at the National Warfare Sorcery Weapon Training Institute, an orphanage that accepts both boys and girls into its ranks in order to turn them into skilled killers. It devours their emotions, turning them into automatons that perform their duty—all except for Sheena Totsuki, who’s grief renders her unable to perform in class, because the girl who died? Yeah, that was her roommate.

So when she meets Mimi, a girl covered in blood, Sheena finds camaraderie for the first time, despite their different ideas on what it means to exist as orphans whose only purpose is to be useful.

This is a very bloody show. We’re shown the destroyed, dead bodies of teenage girls and the bloody survivors who return multiple times. I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day even starts with an in medias res shot of a girl dying in the rain. This show is brutal because war is brutal and unkind and horrific.

It also isn’t afraid to juxtapose violence with the everyday lives of teenagers. Of course, with the introduction of Mimi into the show, things get even more intense, largely because Mimi is so dang cheerful and also completely okay with murder.

And damn, it makes for excellent and complex yuri.

Right from the start, this episode establishes its bittersweet world as cutthroat and finite. The girls and boys who are made into national weaponry have mayfly lives and can die at any moment. It’s why they’re trained not to feel grief—or, really, punished for expressing it. Grief takes away from being able to use magic, from being able to control magic.

While all her classmates are human, Sheena still has her humanity: she openly weeps multiple times, unable to reckon with the violence that forms the core of her life. As a result, we get two diverging perspectives: Sheena, who is middling at magic and wears her heart on her sleeve, and Mimi, who is upbeat but off-putting due to her immediate proximity to violence.

As a pair, they set the story off-kilter. Sheena wants nothing to do with the violence that’s expected of her, but Mimi is the school’s secret weapon and has an unnerving hunger for slaughter.

When placed as roommates, their dissonate existences intensify the haunting lives that fill the school. That’s not to say there’s no levity or everyday interactions; it’s just that they’re made much more complicated in a way that entices the viewer to think quite deeply about this series as a whole.

I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is excellent yuri, but it’s also excellent storytelling. This premiere really captures the environment of an academic orphanage for children whose existence is dedicated to deployment at any time. Reduced to numbers instead of names, these children––and they are very much still children—are not allowed to simply exist. They are treated as weaponry, discarded with the snap of a finger.

I think that combination of dark fantasy with sapphic storytelling is exactly what I needed, and why it’s easy to say that you should absolutely be sat to see this explicitly queer story through to the end. And this story is openly queer, much like Botan Kamiina. I think that’s really important in a time where, globally, there’s a lot of discourse around queerness and its legality. 

Ultimately, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is fantastic, offering up a subtle, mindful drama that has me itching for the next episode. Thankfully, there’s eight volumes of the localized manga available for me to devour, and trust me. I’ll be picking it up for sure.