Love Flops (or Renai Flops, to use the fairly simple Japanese title) is a show that starts with a premise that’s strange enough: A random boy of otherwise little note has his day predicted with absurd accuracy by an AI fortune teller, including not one but five completely out-of-the-blue love confessions. Sounds crazy, right? And it’s an anime original, so there should hopefully be something interesting.
Well, we actually start out with a “dream” (as much as starting dreams ever are) with our main boy meeting a mysterious girl in a plane that’s very clearly a digital realm, before they both seem to dissolve into code. I want this to be remembered for later, but watching Love Flops the first time I already knew what show I was going to have to link everybody to at some point.
Thus, we’re properly introduced, through our main character waking up to receive that fortune and live it out, to our world of future conveniences and cooking bananas in toasters. It’s surreal, so I guess it’s futuristic. The prediction isn’t quite as “Hey you!” as the pitch makes it sound, but the AI fortune teller on TV does rattle off our lead’s birthday and a series of lucky words where he’ll have the most stereotypical harem romance encounters, starting with a girl running late, holding toast in her mouth, crashing into him.
If you thought that was possibly funny or charming, especially because toast girl was at least a little understanding, unfortunately the subsequent encounters are more violent, shrill, and generally the kind of stuff that makes you need to look away if you’re at all sensitive to painful awkwardness.
The rest of the day doesn’t go any better, as they are all of course transfers into his school (though one is a teacher and another is pretending to be a boy for some reason) and naturally take out their unjustified and occasionally inexplicable anger while our protagonist digs himself deeper into a pit with various gaffes. Things do get a little better, with most of the messes cleared up, though not without being raped by a dog along the way.
So, if you survive the first episode all the way to its one seemingly arbitrary and absurd confession, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of what’s going on: you’ve got an over-the-top harem comedy that’s going to beat every dead horse as a way of parodying the genre on its way to a twist that’s pretty much spelled out in bright neon letters. But I’ll get there when the show does. The other four confessions come out pretty quickly in episode two, followed by all five appearing at our lead’s place before he does, declaring they’re his potential brides (by order of his dad, remotely) and will be staying for the foreseeable future. They get the truly over-the-top bullcrap out of their systems, and the show can continue with its premise in place. To his credit, the lead does try to evict them, but a nice speech from toast girl (which causes her to have a strange flash of other memory) wins him over.
Now is as good a time as any to introduce our characters. Our lead is Asahi Kashiwagi, and he is the generic one. Milquetoast through and through, with the slightest hint of not putting up with the BS quite as automatically as others might while still, you know, putting up with it.
Toast girl is Aoi Izumisawa, with a theme color of purple. Aoi comes out of the gate swinging being the “demure girl with glasses” archetype and getting dramatically better non-crazy scenes, as well as being the one who gets singled out front and center with the first meeting, first confession, and so on.
We then have the model, Karin Istel, who somewhat against types for modeling is the spunky short-haired girl in yellow.
Rounding out the openly female classmates is Amelia Irving, the red-haired obvious tsundere with a petite figure and twintails.
In green, we have the teacher Mongfa Bai. She’s Chinese in an anime so obviously she wears a qipao and has some kung fu moves. She’s also drawn so as to not look out of place in the lineups.
Finally, the crossdresser is Ilya Ilyukhina, who gets white. Proper name as revealed later is Irina. I’ll be honest if not for the premise of the show spoiling it the “boy” act would actually be pretty decent. “He” is small, slight, and fragile but makes a more convincing guy than Megu from If Her Flag Breaks (who is actually supposed to be male), being kind of on par with Muv Luv’sMikoto Yoroi if you sucked out everything interesting about him/her.
Following the introduction, we get the expected single-character-focus episodes. It starts with Amelia, indulging in her competitive side, pervy side, and lack of good Japanese. Then we get Ilya who, after a horribly embarassing set of antics at the hot springs trip, decides to come out and be herself as Irina for the rest of the show. At least that bit didn’t overstay its welcome on the macro scale. Third is Mongfa, where the show takes a turn into a different genre (though not without the occassional sex joke) to reveal that she’s some kind of former assassin, possibly a cyborg, by having a bunch of other cyborg assassins come after her, kidnapping the lead in the process.
At this point, you should realize that the word of the day for Love Flops is excess. If you happened to think that the over-the-top nature of introducing the girls and the scenario in the first two episodes was simply a matter of getting across that this was in some way a parody, like it was that way because you weren’t supposed to lend it credence… well, that’s probably the case as well, but the degree to which the show turns everything up to eleven indicates it might not be that smart. Sure, the basic premise of going beyond the believable could be said to apply to every aspect, but some of these extra mile moments don’t really seem to be in service to winking at the audience, they just seem to be in service to a decision that if this thing was going to suck, it had better at least be an unforgettable kind of sucking.
Weirdly, I do kind of respect that. It’s the same energy that a lot of the classical Trigger productions have, where they didn’t feel the need to sanitize themselves, censor themselves, or tone things down for a mass audience, trusting instead that their confident brand of strangeness would find the people who would appreciate it.
But while I approve of that kind of thing in media when talking about the philosophical level, there are still right and wrong – or at least competent and incompetent – ways of going about it. Kill la Kill is competent. It knows what it’s doing, knows what it’s saying, and doesn’t compromise itself on that score. It also keeps its off-the-wall ideas focused and consistent enough that we fully accept a world where clothing is the result of evil alien parasites.
Love Flops, on the other hand, comes off as more desperate. Amelia’s episode was something of a breather – pretty much the one overplayed bit was that she got all her kanji from smut, which while awkward didn’t consume the episode. Then we ramp up into Irina’s episode where she spends much of the running time in a towel, hiding being female by having stashed a tengu mask under there. And, if you know what a tengu mask is like, let me tell you that the show is anything but shy with the gag where it looks like she has an unreasonably gigantic raging boner. It’s funny once, when she first appears and our lead… takes note with shock and perhaps some envy, but they continue to play on it for a huge chunk of running time.
Then we get Mongfa’s episode where we jump entirely into another genre. If the show didn’t also manage to get Asahi naked, tied up, humiliated, and covered in lotion it would feel like an episode out of an entirely different show that also went, if not truly all the way, then at least farther than something that is at its core a rom-com would with bloody violence and technobabble about super-soldier assassins.
Because the show doesn’t know when to really breathe within these episodes, it ends up actually numbing the veil of unreality a bit. Sure, this is weird and random and it feels like nothing that would ever happen in a logically consistent universe, but along the way it tips over from highlighting that this might not be actually real in-universe to just feeling like lazy exploitation material to make sure your attention span lasts a horrifying twenty-two minutes
So, forgive me if when, in the next episode, we’re introduced to an invasion of genital-stealing alien robots the world over and Karin transforms into a magical girl in order to fight them, I take it entirely in stride and react internally with jaded disinterest – the exact opposite of what this material is aiming for.
And of course, her powers are derived from getting turned on. The episode plays out, essentially, like a lost episode of Hybrid x Heart, but since I’m feeling way less charitable to the goofy setup, I might prefer to liken it to Super HxEros, except it’s even more gormless and unspiced than that show, going right up and having Asahi reject Karin because apparently her respecting herself to not sleep with a guy she’s obsessed with when the fate of the world hangs in the balance is the important part. Either way, there’s regret to be had.
Whatever, the castration monsters are blasted to kingdom come once Karin starts feeling all romantic rather than sexual, and the episode ends with another of those weird (or perhaps, obvious) memory glitches and the revelation that Asahi’s talking alarm clock seems to be part of a conspiracy with some kind of mad scientist lady and a bunch of other stuffed rabbit mascot alarm clocks.
This isn’t even effective exploitation. It’s more like the producers played a couple rounds of Cards Against Humanity, inserting tons of topics or phrases that have taboo or exploitative elements to them, but without any narrative logic that would make them effective. At this point, you just have to hope that the inevitable twist I mentioned at the start comes sooner rather than later, as it’s the only thing that could possibly salvage the show we have before us.
While logic would normally dictate getting an Aoi episode, I guess their relative closeness in Episode 2 counts as hers, and Episode 7 instead works on starting to deliver the twist. We get another scene of young Asahi and the mystery girl being set to childhood friend romance, before launching into the beach episode… except Aoi isn’t there, and isn’t acknowledged. After wasting time putting Asahi in a gimp mask and other such nonsense, the other four vanish, and Aoi appears. Shortly after, Asahi’s memories of the others existing vanishes as well, though something nags at him, like there should be a crowd, while Aoi acts sinister for the audience.
This culminates with Aoi’s second attempt at a confession, but before she can give him the kiss of presumably bad news, he manages to properly recall the others. This causes Aoi to glitch out, and seemingly turn into the girl from before, now identified as Ai, who wanted to be with Asahi but evidently couldn’t.
As obvious as this was from episode 1, the show then proceeds to throw all the technobabble at the audience in an episode-long exposition dump when Asahi wakes up in the real world and a mad scientist finds him in his state of confusion.
First, real versus virtual world, with the world the show has been in up until now being virtual. Asahi doesn’t believe this and takes it very poorly, going through stages of screaming and shutting down, as apparently his mind is pretty scrambled from the experience. For the fuller explanation, I hope you’re taking notes on the lecture.
Asahi was a “random” selection for a project to get AIs to experience and understand human emotions, specifically a sub-experiment on romantic feelings. All five of the girls were AI test subjects, and they seemed weird and crazy in episode 1 because they didn’t get it yet. Asahi appears to have signed up for this having been an absentee from school for a long time, evidently moping about Ai. Thus his life was scanned and he was put in the simulation with the mad scientist playing the one guy friend character to monitor the situation, while the girls were designed by international teams in order to find a character who would “click” so they could experience reciprocation, hence the cliched romance tropes.
However, now things have glitched to hell, which would be trouble for the mad scientist if she could feel troubled about anything. We get a long lecture about the nature of AI in this universe and its development, but the important part is that the most modern AIs, including all the girls, are based on human brain scans. Specifically, they’re derived from one human brain scan because the creator of brain uploading basically left a black box behind… and that brain scan appears to have been of Ai, suggesting that every artificial intelligence in the world is unfairly biased towards Asahi due to her lingering attachments. Asahi, for his part, tries to find Ai and is left scream-crying over her grave, since she had a terminal disease.
As for what comes next, it seems like Aoi (who might be a little more close to the original than others, as well as more self-aware by the end) is still glitching out, has escaped containment, and is causing chaos.
And this is where I pull in the show I knew I was going to have to pull in from the start: If Her Flag Breaks. You know, the other, older, over-the-top romantic comedy that it turns out takes place in a virtual world thereby excusing (or trying to excuse) its weirdness.
It’s interesting – despite being more overtly unnatural from the start, what with the flag-o-vision directly referencing a programming topic, If Her Flag Breaks was far less obvious about where it was going, though perhaps that can be more credited to Love Flops being about as subtle as its penis innuendos (or a brick to the face, if you prefer). If Her Flag Breaks was more tame than Love Flops, by a mile at that, but despite this its candy-coated and somewhat magical world was primed very precisely for the audience to accept the fact that it wasn’t real. Despite going bigger, which should be more obvious in its fakery, and despite the audience clearly knowing from the start exactly what twist was coming, I don’t think the world was as perfectly primed, because it crossed a line into sheer idiocy and mayhem that If Her Flag Breaks never felt like it went beyond. In essence, Love Flops overbids its madness while Price is Right rules are in effect: the assignment was to get as close as possible to the line without going over.
But, I digress. At this juncture, what I should be comparing and contrasting is the deployment of the twist, and in that there is one huge difference that keeps me from simply writing Love Flops off as the cheap knockoff of If Her Flag Breaks where Cute Girls Doing Cute Things was replaced by Cards Against Humanity. The show’s hopes are pinned on this fact: If Her Flag Breaks had only two episodes left until retirement when it deployed its twist; Love Flops, counting the exposition dump of episode 8, has five.
It does take its sweet time about things, though. After the episode entirely on exposition dump, we have another entirely on getting Asahi onto the plot hook. Essentially, he has to go back to the digital world, which might be in something of a state because Aoi/Ai is going nuts… but he’s the only one who would be allowed in and thus the only one with any chance of saving Aoi, as the others explain when they manage to make contact with the real world.
It might be pretty important for them, too, as the mad scientist’s company (from which she’s been fired) is planning to use a back door to have a program erase everything, which would effectively kill not only Aoi but the other well-behaving AI girls as well.
Even then, we still have to do a refusal of the call beat before an extended flashback to Ai convinces Asahi to go along with this rather than moping.
At least in the process we get the alternate definition of “Flops” as computing cycles, completing the title’s pun.
First up we re-meet the girls and have a running fight trying to get to Aoi as Logout programs bar the way and the Deletion program chases them like a robot-snake-Langolier, turning the mooks into its more deadly minions along the way, ending when we get an extremely extended speech from and sendoff for Mongfa as she sacrifices herself to bar their way.
It’s a shame – Mongfa’s speech and even her account of what it was like to learn how to feel is actually good material. But it goes on a good deal too long at a moment when the enemies are supposed to be bearing down on them and just have to shuffle awkwardly while she goes on and on talking. It’s also, in theory, the development note that all the characters got, expressed, so even while Mongfa’s death should be a big deal, especially since we’re supposed to believe it really is permadeath for her, it sort of preempts getting the huge talk for the first time in a better place.
Sure enough, we bleed off Irina, Karin, and Amelia in the next episode. They’re left a little more ambiguous and after Mongfa was registered deleted the Mad Scientist’s friend showed up to help with “one more thing we can do”, but the point still stands that they’re all given death speeches about when they fell in love and became their own person, with the flashback to a related moment between Asahi and Ai in their memories that triggered it. All four of the girls get this moment, and the swarming enemies are pretty arbitrary, what with the shift to this dramatic battle scenario with the previous noncombatants Irina and Amelia getting Tengu and Wizard morphs.
Now, there have been good arcs that do this. The Muv Luv Alternative visual novel has a particularly powerful sequence that has a pretty similar dynamic. But there it’s supported, features some heavy dramatic irony, and isn’t quite so repetitive; most of the last stands have their own unique flair to them. Here, it’s kind of a broken record. Amelia even repeats Mongfa’s sin of getting to talk as long as she wants with enemies at the gate, only she seems to sacrifice herself for far less reason.
This brings us to Aoi for the final episode. She gives the short and sweet version of the talk – about what it needed to be, and ushers Asahi onto Ai after delivering a very long flashback of her memories of her decline and death.
The meat of the final episode is Asahi and Ai talking out their grief and regrets, how Asahi will remember her, and how they both loved each other. The sequence ends as they kiss, we get a non-diagetic love song, and she (evidently in her current state, something that shouldn’t exist) fades away.
To be honest, this is the best stuff in the show by far and that’s kind of my problem with Love Flops. But first, the proper ending: Ai leaves Asahi with a trinket. This combines with four suspiciously colored butterflies that are with Aoi to form a bright light that supposedly fixes things and sends Asahi back to the real world, where the satellite that held the virtual world deorbits in a fireball.
A couple years later, Asahi is ready to go to college, hanging out with some real world friends and delivering flowers at Ai’s grave… only to receive a suspicious delivery. If you guessed that the girls had backups you win no prize, given the setup with the mad scientist’s friend. Even Mongfa, who died before she showed up, is there, Aoi coming last because she wanted to walk herself rather than being delivered in a box. The five of them (and not Ai for some reason) now have full-on robot bodies that look just like their digital avatars, and seem inclined to pick up where they left off. The end.
Now, back to the issue.
The strong material in Love Flops is all around Ai. She’s a nice character, given a full characterization despite how much she hung out in the background for the first half, and the drama between her and Asahi is really, legitimately good – especially since it doesn’t cop out or flinch away from the fact that she’s dead, and this is a done deal.
But at the same time, so much is sacrificed to build that. The flashbacks to Ai’s time are stupidly long, and even if they are good on their own they bring the flow of the episodes they’re in to a screeching halt. What’s more, while I may not have particularly enjoyed the jokes in Love Flops, and how it thinks that going below the belt is instant humor (it is not), that was the vibe of the show, and then at the halfway mark it just tosses that right in the bin for episodes of technobabble explanation and heavy drama into which stagger random “somebody is naked” gags that no longer belong.
And with burning an episode and a half on killing off Mongfa, Karin, Irina, and Amelia, they sure come back like it’s no big deal. I wouldn’t be mad about this except for what the show is doing with Ai. It’s clear that it’s trying to convince Asahi to live in the world, and move forward while carrying her memory, and it has a serious and uncompromising take on her death that she’s not allowed to cheat. So why do her clown town alter egos get a free pass?
As a viewer watching for enjoyment I guess I’d rather these characters, who were more likable than not for the most part, not be stone dead, but from a perspective of telling a strong story like the second half wants to tell, it seems out of place. I’d accept Aoi since she was both the one with the most sane and real-world-capable personality and the one who didn’t explicitly get axed, but all of them with no preamble are just robots now?
There’s even this little grace note setup that’s gutterballed right at the end. In the first episode where Asahi returns to the real world, there’s an unnamed girl from his class who recognizes him despite the fact he hasn’t been coming to school, and later is focused on when she notices him, outside of school and running with the mad scientist. As the epilogue begins, she’s there along with another random friend as who Asahi is hanging out with, and while he has to ditch to give Ai’s grave some flowers, you’d think you could get it: Asahi needed to learn how to move on, and his experience teaching Aoi and the others what it meant to love might, in turn, have allowed him to learn to love again after losing someone who was so dear to him.
I don’t care about nameless classmate girl. She’s literally a no-name character. But if the story Love Flops wanted to tell was the one that its actual good material, the material with Ai, was grounded in, it would have used her if anyone as the rebound, forcing Asahi to move on rather than dragging him back to zany antics with a house full of AI Waifus. That, or just Aoi.
You could find this somewhat similar to the ending of Dusk Maiden of Amnesia, which I actually liked, at least on careful review. But in that show it was solidly grounded in the fact that it was a 1:1 romance and needed a romance-genre ending that was not otherwise to be delivered.
It’s the Icarus problem. I quoted Randal Munroe in my Guilty Crown review and I stand by it: it’s not an inherent hubris, it’s the limits of wax as adhesive. Dusk Maiden knew how to blend its seemingly contradictory genres of Horror and Romance. Love Flops doesn’t know how to do the same for RomCom and Drama. One had the engineering specs to fly as close to the sun as it wanted to, the other simply does not. And because of that poor engineering, Love Flops crashes and burns despite or even because of its lofty ambitions.
The middle of this show, if it wasn’t clear, did a lot to alienate me. Karin’s magical girl twist and the episode around it is probably the worst bit, but the episode that’s almost entirely exposition with no real emotional processing of that exposition was almost as bad if for entirely different reasons. The back half, I’ve already talked over just above, while the front couple of episodes were a little bit more solid. I may complain about how hamfisted the show is with its twist, but at least it does set the dang thing up rather than waiting until Aoi’s beach episode to show any hint of otherness. Being too obvious isn’t great, but being too obtuse and failing to establish that something like this could be the case in the context of the show would be worse.
For all of that, what kind of final grade does Love Flops get? It does fall flat, but at the same time there’s good stuff in it that you can sift out. I don’t want to oversell what the show gets right, but it does legitimately get things right.
For me, it comes down on the C/D border, and I’m going to err on the generous side and give Love Flops a C-. It’s a pain, but it will reward you for that pain, at least somewhat. I can’t really recommend going out to find it, but if you (like the creators) are the type for whom raunchy is inherently funny you’ll probably not be as turned off by the first act and like it well enough. But all the same I’d much rather recommend If Her Flag Breaks as the stronger take.