My Friend’s Little Sister Has It In for Me! – Episode 1

Content Warning: fan service, incest

What’s it about? Ohboshi Akiteru is a pragmatic high-schooler with his eyes set on joining prestigious media company Honeplace Works as a game developer. He’s got an in, since his uncle is the CEO, but the job offer requires that he not have a girlfriend. The titular little sister, Kohinata Iroha, announces herself as his (fake) girlfriend to try and ward off interest, but it turns out Akiteru’s job does require playing fake boyfriend…to a completely different girl.

You see that there? That’s what we call “too much premise.” We’ve got a little sister fetish, bullying kink, not one but two vectors of fake dating, and a little bit of actual incest just for spice. It makes this episode an absolutely overstuffed mess that feels like it completely restarts at the two-thirds mark in the process of introducing the second love interest. Also this is the second premiere this season trying to get me on board with a nepo baby protagonist, and I am simply not having it.

More than the fetish content, which the script is kind enough to announce with a megaphone for anyone at risk of stepping in unawares, what grated me about this premiere was its agonizing and constant stabs at self-awareness. Akiteru opens the show with a monologue about how it doesn’t make any sense for someone to bully their crush, and he can’t possibly imagine why someone would act so counter-intuitively. His best friend Ozuma point-blank says that Iroha is probably nursing a crush. The opening scene is full of Iroha namechecking tropes, while Akiteru’s uncle lectures him that being tsundere only works in anime. The opening is a straight throwback to moe-era meme openings, high-pitched and hyper-energetic (which I don’t mind) and wall-to-wall with as many dated memes and box-checking pin-up costumes as possible (which is exhausting).

This is side-by-side with the show doing the tropes in question as loudly as possible, falling into the age-old trap of thinking that pointing out you’re doing hack work is the same thing as subverting it. The closest we get to actually selling the mental gap of the premise is when Iroha pulls a “fake” confession, a scene that’s carried exclusively by Suzushiro Sayumi’s extremely game vocal performance. She’s throwing herself into the material above and beyond the rest of the cast, and for a brief second I bought why someone could hear that and then feel guarded and betrayed when the “gotcha” comes out…and then we go merrily along to Akiteru walking in on his cousin in the toilet.

Yes, the second banana is Akiteru’s cousin, Mashiro, who speaks in a barely legible whisper and is transferring to public school after being truant from her prestigious all-girls academy. Her uncle wants a protector for her, and is willing to offer Aki and his small dev team (who put out a popular Higurashi clone for mobile) a job at his company in exchange for fake boyfriend duties. Of course, if he actually makes any moves, he’s out on his ear. Oddly, despite all the trope-laden dialogue to this point, nobody points out that it’s maybe going to make Mashiro look like more of a freak if she rocks up to her new school life dating her first cousin, because consistency is for losers. I’d feel bad for her as the obvious source of conflict who will absolutely not be ending up with the protagonist, except her introduction is as emotionally complex as a Waffle House menu.

While the camera is shockingly restrained on said bathroom walk-in (Mashiro’s skirt covers any nudity), it is not so demure in regards to Iroha, who’s introduced with a shot of her butt cheeks peeking out from under her skirt. Lots of close-ups on her cleavage, her boobs pressing into Akiteru from various angles, the works. I’ve seen more degrading shows, but the combined stink of back-patting and shamelessness made me glad to be shot of this one.