Season aired: Summer 2024
Number of episodes: 12
Watched on: Crunchyroll
Translated by: ?
Genres: Comedy, Romance
Thoughts: I had a good feeling about Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines (“Makeine”) from the synopsis, but if you told me that it would become one of my favorite anime this season, I would’ve been doubtful. All promotional art features three colorful girls who fit perfectly into harem stereotypes: the genki winner, the sporty tomboy, and the anxious bookworm. While the synopsis describes these three as losing heroines who don’t win their romantic interests, the girls seemed ripe for the picking for a plain, unexceptional protagonist named Nukumizu.
Nukumizu spends many days reading romance, but he has yet to experience it himself. His fate abruptly changes when he accidentally overhears Anna, one of the popular girls in class, encouraging her crush to romantically pursue after his crush by selflessly confessing her own love to him, claiming that even with his rejection, she finds the love she holds for him worth it. As predicted, her crush turns her down on the spot, but thanks her for her sacrifice and immediately leaves Anna alone to pursue after the other girl. Anna copes with the nonexistent breakup by bombarding Nukumizu’s quiet lunch and eating up all of his food. Her entrance into his life drags him toward a colorful cast of other losing heroines at his high school.
This anime is funny, and it only works because all the characters are comedic in different ways. It’s easy to slide Nukumizu in as the straight man, but like all the other characters, he has his own quirks, too. He’s obsessed with the taste of tap water and is passionate enough to even argue with another character about which faucet in the school tastes the best. Too often, the male lead in a series is just a cardboard cutout meant for male viewers to self-insert so they can live a fantasy of being surrounded by cute anime girls. However, Nukumizu has well-established hobbies, quirks, personality, and relationships. In fact, as the series continued, I got the sense that he’s more interested in the idea of romance than actual romance, as he admits that reading these romantic developments are far more interesting than watching them happen in real life.
His relationship with all three girls is charming, and despite the comedy, full of soul. He’s not the oblivious protagonist of a harem anime. He’s the supportive best friend that the camera is suddenly focusing on, who’s always listening to them rant even when he is tired because he cares about and likes being friends with these girls. There’s a quiet joy, acceptance, and comfort whenever he’s listening to them gossip, enjoying a school trip with them, and prepping for the school festival.
It’s disingenuous to only praise a good male lead when the story lends just as much development to its three female characters. Anna, Lemon, and Chika, all lost in the love triangle war, each express very different emotional reactions. Anna provides the main source of the comedy, but there’s something so raw and real about how difficult it is for her to still remain good friends with the couple who knowingly only got together at the expense of her own feelings. Chika’s confession and knowing rejection was accidental – blurted out in the heat of a moment. Her conflicting feelings come from the fact that her crush and her crush’s crush are two senpais who treat her with a lot of care and empathy, making her feel like a villain for having these feelings in the first place. As a result, unlike with Anna, the rejection feels freeing, and she is relieved to find that she can maintain close friendships with her two senpais, now dating, without that conflict constantly hovering over her.
My favorite, however, is Lemon. Personally, when it comes to love triangles, I usually hate the losing character. Their insistence in retaining their love for a character who doesn’t reciprocate feels either like manufactured drama or a selfish decision that their feelings matter more than anyone else’s. My frustration grows exponentially when the losing character tries to take advantage of alone time in an attempt to steal their crush away. Lemon is that character, and yet, I sympathized with her rather than hated her. In one scene, she openly confesses to having unscrupulous ideas, wondering if she could steal her crush away by spending as much alone time as possible with him. She then breaks down, hating herself for having these thoughts and wishing these feelings never developed. She is certain if she didn’t fall in love, she wouldn’t be disgusted with the person she had become.
For the first time, I genuinely believe that love is a feeling that can go beyond someone’s control, and seeing the poor girl desperately try to control it made me forgive all the other bad ideas she had. This is a comedy anime. It makes fun of rom-com tropes, and every episode is laugh-out-loud funny, yet it pulls out some of the best dialogue about love and its complications that I’ve seen.
The animation is exceptionally well done, which is part of why, despite the heavy emotions, the comedy still hits. Character quirks, like Anna’s deftness with chopsticks, wouldn’t translate onscreen as funny if the animation didn’t show her quickness in grabbing onto Nukumizu’s jacket and his ensuing dramatic struggle to get out of her chopstick grip. Another example is a student council character whose constant anemia is portrayed like she crawled right out of a horror movie, accompanied with full twitching, sudden head turns, and insistent non-blinking eyes.
The voice acting is equally good in the dramatic and comedic acting.. A special mention goes out to Hikaru Tono, who voices Anna and all the colorful noises of frustration she makes when she’s forced to deal with PDA from her couple friends. Everyone in the cast did an incredible job, but I personally think Hikaru had the hardest job in making sure Anna’s performance isn’t too theatrical because of how dramatic her character can be.
What was an anime I tentatively started became an anime that checked all my boxes subjectively and objectively. The characters are nuanced, funny, and real. Thanks to the voice acting and the visual direction, the anime kept both comedy and drama without sacrificing the other. Makeine is a good reminder that sometimes the stories with the most heart actually comes from genres you don’t expect.
Rating
Plot: 8 (Multiplier 3)
Characters: 8.5 (Multiplier 3)
Art/Animation: 8.5 (Multiplier 2)
Voice acting: 8
Soundtrack: 7.5
FINAL SCORE: 82
