Rent-a-Girlfriend is not a masterpiece. Heck, it's not even one of the top anime of the season. But it does something that few other shows of its kind do: it's not afraid to present a horrendously broken protagonist struggling to deal with his own problems.
Ya'll probably recognize the generic harem protagonist: average looks, totally oblivious, prone to misunderstandings and extremely horny. That's basically the recipe, right? Rent-a-Girlfriend's protagonist Kazuya is exactly like that, but instead of treating those flaws I listed as a joke, the show puts them under a magnifying glass and lets Kazuya stare at them intently. He sees how uncool he is. He understands how desperate he is. And to top it all off, the show starts with him being dumped by his girlfriend of one month, which has utterly annihilated the little confidence he probably had to begin with.
Kazuya is not a hero. He's not the shounen protagonist who always does the right thing. He's not the cool guy in class that all the girls like. He's not even the likable dork that blunders his way to happiness. He's a down-on-his-luck twenty year old virgin who hates himself and confuses desirability for worth; in other words, he feels like he's nothing unless some cute girl wants to be romantically involved with him.
He's screwed up. And it's this screwed up nature of his that leads him to literally rent the anime's main heroine Chizuru as a girlfriend. Incidentally, Chizuru is a near-perfect foil to Kazuya; she's capable, driven, smart, thoughtful, and a rather attractive specimen of a woman. She also happens to be the perfect balm to Kazuya's broken personality.
I mean that when I say it; Chizuru's purpose as a character is to "fix" Kazuya. She puts him in his place when he does something wrong, gives him confidence when he has none, pulls him to his feet when he's feeling hopeless, and supports him when nobody else believes he's worth the time of day. I'd even go so far as to say that the draw of this show is not hoping that Kazuya ends up with Chizuru, but believing that Kazuya can be fixed, and can therefore become worthy of her, whether they end up together or not.
Rent-a-Girlfriend is not a harem (at least not in its first season). It's a boy-meets-girl story and character drama with a million extra steps and complications. Are those million extra steps and complications necessary? No. Not all of them. The story is riddled with silly drama sideshows that slow the pace of the character development. That's why I didn't give the anime a higher score. But it's still a decent show despite that, and the fact that people love to hate its protagonist just because he's not another perfect anime gigachad or something gives me a migraine.
Be nice to the kid; he's already suffering enough.
