Seriously, what should this sub-genre even be called? The Declining Japanese Birthrates Genre? Newcomers may not know what I’m talking about, but over the past few years, we’ve been getting a lot of anime like this where, by contrast to the usual highschool romcom, we get a show that has every tangible element of a highschool romcom, that looks and feels exactly like a highschool romcom, and that features a cast of characters whose behavior and emotional maturity is fundamentally indistinguishable from those in highschool romcoms, but which instead takes place in an office around allegedly adult characters. The initial thinking was that anime fans were growing up, graduating from highschool, entering the workforce, and would no longer be able to relate to teenage characters in a highschool setting, so the industry decided to give them similarly aged characters to project themselves onto, but it didn’t take long for everyone to realize this genre was most likely manufactured for a much more underhanded reason.
Think military recruitment propaganda. They show you strong, capable soldiers engaging in exhilarating heroics, fighting for their country side by side with their trustworthy brothers and sisters in arms. They then say, “That could be you too! Sign up now! GoArmy dot com!” The idea is to romanticize and idealize a position which is actually much more grueling and unsexy than you’re made to believe, so that way you voluntarily sign up and only realize the reality of the situation after you’ve committed and can’t so easily back out. This genre which I’ve elected to call The Declining Japanese Birthrates Genre is functionally military recruitment propaganda, only instead of advertising positions in the military, it’s advertising positions in society as a whole, from which otaku have become increasingly estranged. “You don’t want to work and/or impregnate a girl to further the great Yamato race? You’d rather stay in your room and watch anime? Well, look at this! There’s cute anime girls in the workforce now too! [insert job hunting websites here]”
This genre didn’t proliferate as a consequence of otaku entering the workforce. It proliferated as a consequence of them NOT entering the workforce, and when you start viewing these shows through the lens of bait, you simply cannot see them as anything else, and while these undertones don’t necessarily make these shows bad, they’re definitely manipulative. The first episode literally opens with the cute main girl running out her front door like Hirasawa Yui before her yelling, “Let’s go to work!” And it concludes with her looking directly into the camera, pouting, timidly blushing, and saying, “Couldn’t I be your wife?” I mean, is it even fucking possible to get more heavy-handed than that? The show goes so far out of its own way and so far beyond the furthest bounds of reality to paint the salaryman lifestyle in the most nicey-nice, happy-go-lucky, relaxed light it feasibly can, and yet despite having the transparency of a fucking window and despite my attempts to infect you with my cynicism, it nearly redeems itself simply by being a Doga Kobo show.
Doga Kobo produces nothing but moe shows, and they’re really damn good at it. While their level of polish is much more modest than Kyoto Animation, for example, their animation is still consistently better than most modern anime, and as is usually the case, they clearly put a lot of effort into this. I personally think some of the character design elements aren’t particularly beautiful, like the main girl Futaba’s swampy green hair or the main guy Takeda’s distractingly bulky proportions, but overall, the artwork and animation is good enough that I quickly got over these minor subjective complains. Of course, the waifu bait isn’t complete unless you have a wide selection of girls, and the side couples the show sets up are at times even more likable than the main duo, whose gimmicky relationship can sometimes honestly overstay its welcome. At the end of the day, if you can look past its obvious intentions and just consume it as a generic, shallow, forgettable, but admittedly cute and fun workplace romcom, then this show is perfectly not bad.
Thank you for reading.
