Review: Chunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai! Ren

Strike a pose.

3ET: N/A

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Warning: this review may contain SPOILERS and a reality check for anime romance


I found the first season of Chunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai to be a perfectly fine high school romance. It had a silly premise, a girl (Takanashi Rikka) who acts as if her delusions of magical battles and made up demons are actually real meets a boy (Togashi Yuuta) who used to do the same, but wants to leave that part of himself behind. Over the course of the show, Yuuta finds out that Rikka's father passed away, and that she's using her delusions cope with it. Eventually, he helps her come to terms with her father's death, and the two enter into a "love contract", or as we would call it, a relationship. It was a cute story, with more heart at its core than I would have thought given its premise. It was also quite entertaining, with its cast of deluded misfits adding comedy to balance out the drama. All in all, I thought it was a good show.

This is what Rikka actually believes.

So, what the hell happened for season two? It goes nowhere. Because itt had nowhere to go. Yuuta and Rikka were together, so that wasn't a thing that had any more real drama to mine. Sure, they could have the normal high school romance issues, but watching that would have been cripplingly boring. So, like any show that is out of ideas, but needs some new content, they add a new character. The girl (of course it's a girl), Shichimiya Satone, had a crush on Yuuta. And she has delusions. So, logically she creates a love triangle. However, Satone is little more than a knock-off of Rikka with a less interesting story. So she moved away from a boy she liked, big deal. Compared to Rikka's arc in the first season, hers comes of as a trite waste of time.

And since there isn't much of a story here, I mean Yuuta is never going to leave Rikka for Satone, this show falls into the old cliches of the high school show. In just twelve episodes, there needed to be a pool episode and a beach episode. There were episodes about the other characters, but they were pretty much ineffective comedy episodes. I say ineffective because the jokes used were recycled from the first season, and these are the kind of gags that get less funny the more I see them. And despite not being a harem show, only because there are girls who don't have a crush on Yuuta, there is a complete lack of male characters. In fact, the only one who shows up exists only so the show can build up all season for one very homophobic and moderately racist joke.

No, KyoAni. Just, no.

Now, there is some drama between Yuuta and Rikka. And on the surface, it comes from a legitimate place. To put it succinctly, Rikka doesn't want to do anything physical with Yuuta at the start of the series. Even holding hands is too much for her. There is some progress where she's able to take small steps, setting up the final episode. The climatic scene comes as Yuuta tries to have their first kiss. He backs off when he sees that she's frightened, which is good. We don't want boys touching, kissing, or doing anything else to girls who don't want it. On the other hand, Yuuta's acquiescence to this situation is completely absurd. By the time this happens, he and Rikka have been dating for quite a while. And it's perfectly reasonable to think that kissing should be part of the relationship. To say that Yuuta is completely all right with this arrangement makes him look like he is the mythical creature known as "the teenage boy without a sex drive". This whole story arc also highlights one of the main issues anime has when portraying teenage boys. Too often, they are either completely pure and have no idea what sex is, or they are aggressive perverts who want to hump anything with breasts in sight. Of course, most boys are in-between these two extremes, and Chuunibyou Ren's failure to see that makes it just the latest in the long line of high school anime romances to characterize boys in that way. As for Rikka, she is clearly not in good working order to be with Yuuta. She is either too scared of him, or just too immature to understand what is going on. In either case, she shouldn't be in a relationship at all. And one last thing, can we stop acting like teenagers in Japan don't have sex? If they are human teenagers, and all signs point to that being the case, they do. And that fact needs to stop being treated as dangerous and horrible, and being treated as a part of the human experience for adolescents.

Still, it's a better love story than Twilight.

With that rant over with, I can safely say that Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai Ren is a sequel that did not need to happen. The only value it had was that it gave the animators practice at making gorgeous battle scenes the illustrate the delusions. And that is pretty much the only thing that stayed constant from season one. Everything else got worse, and the new characters were tiresome and added nothing interesting to the plot. I can safely say that I'm off this ride, and a season three will pass me by without me giving it a second thought.

Final Score: 3/10