You know how very often the male lead in school anime romance affairs is as dense as a brick? Usually, this holds off the foregone conclusion of a harem, but they went and made a whole show about a single-target romance between an admittedly tomboyish girl and her neutronium brick of a childhood friend. That would be Tomo-chan is a Girl! (the title is excited).
This is literally how the show starts. This is the first thing we see. The most direct, unambiguous confession you could get in mere words. And the guy in question? He interprets love as brotherly. Somehow. Because that’s the premise: Jun here can’t see Tomo, his admittedly kind of rough and tumble childhood friend, as anything other than one of the boys, and in the most blindingly idiot way possible where, rather than the heartbreak of not reciprocating her feelings, he just does not parse them at all.
In fact, a crux of the humor is that Junichirou seems to be actually confused as to Tomo’s gender, like the one funny joke from Nisekoi where Claude couldn’t seem to recognize that his henchman was a fairly well endowed henchwoman, except they made a whole show about it.
Except, that does seem to be less the direction the show goes. Tomo is aided (for a definition of aid) by Misuzu Gundou, who has a history with both her and Junichirou that seems to involve a deep-seated hatred from Jun to Gundou, a reciprocation of that hate, and Gundou’s desire to see Tomo and Jun together if and only if she can troll them the whole way there.
She even manages to drag out, before half of episode one is done, that Jun is not actually that stupid and does know what hardware Tomo is running on. So clearly, there’s some degree of act to her face.
We pretty quickly loop in a couple more characters, like the head of the karate club (who might have a thing for Tomo) and his cousin Carol (the ditzy popular girl, who also considers herself his fiancee). We thus get this as more of the setup status quo: Tomo is in love with Jun. Jun puts up a thick wall of idiot if she does something obvious and tries to treat her like a “best bud” ignoring her gender, but can be hit pretty hard if her more girly charms are made apparent, and seems to get jealous over her when challenged.
So really these two are about as obvious as Kaguya and Miyuki, with an initially sillier hangup and a mutual who is intentionally screwing with them rather than just being a passive agent of chaos. Now that’s a more promising pitch, isn’t it?
So, suffice to say these two have a rather complicated relationship. What comes of it?
Honestly, we mostly go with a series of vignettes that are trying to be independently funny, many of them not actually dealing with Jun and Tomo’s relationship directly.
As we get into the second half, we start to get more serious character work with Tomo, and especially with Gundou and Jun, learning their hangups that make this particular romcom tangle so, well, tangled. Tomo and Jun start to grow closer in the way Tomo would want, and she even begins to find the idea of a change to their relationship somewhat intimidating.
We get a heavy episode for Carol, and then a similarly heavy sequence for Gundou, in each case more or less tying off their personal arcs, Carol’s romance and Gundou’s self-loathing. Finally, we launch into the climax for our main couple as Jun works up the will to tell Tomo, honestly, how she feels, and she needs some time to overcome her nerves and come to an understanding with him that they both want the elements of their current relationship along with being boyfriend and girlfriend, even if that’s not traditional.
The show gives us one extra episode, featuring Jun overcoming a challenge from Tomo’s father (to beat him, the master, in karate), but plays us out sweet overall.
Overall, Tomo-chan is a Girl! is a simple show. It introduces us to relatively likable characters with a situation that doesn’t seem like it would resolve trivially, and lets us see them just sort of work things out over the course of most of a school year.
Compared to something like the first season or two of Kaguya-sama, the comedy is fairly light, being relegated mostly to slapstick because, well, Jun and Tomo both react to awkward situations with martial arts, if most frequently applied by Tomo onto Jun, and in exchange it does some really earnest character building. This is what sets it apart from the bottom of the genre; there’s a fairly similar setup here to When Will Ayumu Make His Move?, but while that show was watchable mediocrity, Tomo is actually fun. It has more humor, and it also has more legitimate romance. It cuts out waste and dead air despite still showing us a fair amount of what feels like slice of life, and replaces it with actual quality.
Tomo-chan doesn’t quite make it to the level of Kaguya-sama, but from the pitch alone, it’s remarkably closer than one would typically expect. For me, it earns a solid, honest B.