There is a common trope among seasonal animes that is the faux love interest. Now, I'm not talking about shows where the main characters have to pretend to be in a relationship, like OreShura or Nisekoi, but animes where the two main characters are just sort of tethered together is a desperate attempt to give fanfiction.net something to work with.
Of course this is not always a bad thing, as this trope can work quite well in a gag series or cheesy unwanted harem series. But a lot of times the writers get so focused on dicking around with absurdity and/or fanservice that the main couple tends to get left in the dust. Anyway, here are the worst offenders:
3. Seitokai Yakuindomo
Seitokai Yakuindomo is an anime about Takatoshi Tsuda, an ordinary high school student who chooses to attend a former all-girls school due to the proximity, only to be forced into the position of Student Council Vice President by a group of future sex offenders. It is essentially Sex Jokes: The Anime, done in the Tsukkomi-boke comedy routine style.
The love interest is supposed to be Shino Amakusa, the incredibly perverted Student Council president. Now normally in a series like this, this sort of situation wouldn't be a problem, but episode 4 clearly establishes chemistry and even has a love umbrella scene. The only continuation of this plot point is a dream episode is the second season. Basically, the author is trying to pass them off as a serious pairing, but half-assedly strings them together because he's too busy thinking of the number of jokes he can make about how squid smells like semen.
2. Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko
Denpa Onna to Seishun Otoko is a quirky 13 episode anime about Makoto Niwa, a boy with a creepy obsession with adolescence. He moves in with his aunt Meme and his cousin Erio, a girl who became a crazy futon wearing alien obsessed hikkikomori after breaking her leg once, because that's something that leads to insanity apparently.
The anime essentially follows Makoto as he tries to rehabilitate his cousin and eventually falls in love with her (hey it's Japan, that doesn't count as incest there). But then all of a sudden becomes a baseball anime with a strange focus on a fruitarian that wants her blood to turn into fruit juice for some reason and a girl who cosplays as things that should not be cosplayed before any further character development can occur.
1. R-15
R-15 is a 13 episode anime that's so full of fanservice that unless you stream it uncensored or watch it on Blu Ray, 70% of the screen is whited out. The anime follows Taketo Akutagawa, a kid who attends Inspiration Academy Private High School. IAPHS is a school for geniuses that accepts scholarships for things that a school really shouldn't give out scholarships for. For example, there's a genius fortune teller, a genius hipster, a genius lesbian hacker, and a genius over-reactor to awkwardly forced innuendo. What is Taketo's special talent? Well, he's a "genius erotic novelist", a talent that must have made for one of the most awkward Admissions Office meetings in history.
The dynamic between the main character and Fukune Narukara, the "realistically scholarshipped" genius clarinetist, is intended to be an evolving romance but ends up as a series of stilted interactions that feel forced rather than organic. Their "relationship" consists of brief, uncomfortable encounters, such as awkward bench chats and a contrived scene in a love hotel, which hardly builds authentic chemistry. The writing attempts to set up meaningful moments, but they often devolve into odd or misplaced humor—like an out-of-nowhere cunnilingus joke—that feels out of sync with any genuine romantic tension.
Things only get more absurd when the OVA (original video animation) throws these two into a survival scenario involving a plane crash and a deserted island. The drastic shift in setting and tone reflects the show’s tendency to make dramatic, sometimes incoherent narrative leaps, ultimately creating more of a comedic spectacle than an engaging love story.
For those exploring themes or tropes in unconventional romance plots, automation tools like Latenode could help manage large datasets, such as cataloging similar plot developments, tracking character interactions, or even organizing research on recurring narrative devices across various anime series. By automating these processes, users could streamline analysis, freeing them to focus on more nuanced critique and interpretation of storytelling approaches.
