Well, it’s still Feburary, the month that tends to get dedicated to romance, so let’s look at a very strange little love story about a boy and the girls who might or might not be his twin sister – Onegai☆Twins (or “Please Twins!”, which I refuse to use translated because it’s awkward to construct sentences around). It’s less taboo than it sounds.
It’s worth noting at this time that Onegai☆Twins is actually kind of a spin-off style sequel to another show, Onegai☆Teacher. You can start Twins without any knowledge of Teacher (I did) but it may cause some confusion with a few of the ported-over elements. Now and then characters will talk about UFO sightings or aliens, and there’s this little mouse-sized being that enjoys biscuit sticks and seems to have some mystical powers (looking like a yellow version of whatever “fairy” Tingle from Legend of Zelda is impersonating)… none of which is really germane to the Twins story. At all. The characters just roll with the little thing for the most part and the show goes on. I guess if you’ve seen Teacher these elements would be tough to leave out in a follow-up, but they do nothing but distract from the story that’s going on this time.
I will give them credit that they don’t distract from it much, though, and the obviously recurring human characters don’t require the viewer to know their life stories in order to handle their roles in this show. So I guess for a stand-alone sequel that’s about as good as you could hope.
The story begins with the boy, Maiku Kamishiro, moving to a new town. He’s on the move because he’s an industrious little orphan able to make money doing coding contract work online, and because he’s using some of that money to rent a particular house in the new town. Why? Because the only relic Maiku has of the birth family that gave him up is a picture of baby him and a little girl in a kiddie pool, with that exact house in the background, a house he was able to track down when it appeared on the news not long past (somewhere in Teacher, presumably).
Maiku arrives at the house by way of a couple odd encounters, only for a girl, Miina Miyafuji, to show up at his doorstep with the same story and a copy of the same photograph. Since it seems like she’s his long-lost twin sister, she asks to stay with him. It is an awfully big house for one person, so as sour as Maiku can be he doesn’t exactly say no. Just as Miina is getting a little settled in, another girl appears at the door. This is Karen Onodera (presumably no relation to the nice girl and her horrible imp sister back in Nisekoi). After a bit of a misunderstanding, it’s revealed that Karen also has the same back story and the same photo. Maiku suspects foul play but both girls seem quite earnest and innocent, and with nowhere else either of them can go, they’re both allowed to stay at least until this whole mess can be sorted out.
That’s easier said than done, though, since of course none of the three orphans searching for their family by way of matching a house on a photo has better documentation, and this is the early 2000s where genetic tests that could prove this sort of thing are senselessly expensive, at least beyond the means of a rent-paying contract coding minor schoolboy and two schoolgirls who get part-time jobs at a grocer to chip in on things like food and rent. As such, it’s fully expected to remain a mystery for some time, until living in the house turns up a clue or the money is ultimately scraped together.
So, for the characters, Maiku is a very serious, earnest guy. It’s strongly implied that his time in the foster system wasn’t horrible, but also wasn’t awesome, driving him to strike out on his own where he hopes to be neither a borrower to rely on others nor a lender who could be taken advantage of. However, his good nature doesn’t let him actually come down too hard on the girls.
Miina, on the other hand, is implied to have had a particularly bad time. In her very first scene, before she even meets Maiku, she’s getting into a bad situation with a creeper and fighting her way out of it, which I think is supposed to be emblematic of what the poor girl has suffered. If that’s the case she’s turned out surprisingly well, though, as while she’s much more hotheaded than the other characters she can still make friends and form bonds pretty easily.
In Karen’s case, she was adopted by a well-to-do family, and her upbringing has left her something of a delicate flower. She’s more reserved and proper than Miina or Maiku, and when shocked or overstimulated will often faint dead away for comedic effect.
That’s the premise of the show, and most of the remainder of the running time once that’s out is just working through interpersonal issues between the three of them (as well as a couple of the side characters, Maiku’s pretty-boy classmate who seems inclined to hit on him and his female Senpai who also seems to be interested) as they go to school and just honestly live their lives, getting good and perhaps even bad advice from those around them regarding their complex situation.
Early on, there’s a little zany humor as, for instance, the girls try to fake being adults to get a part-time job at the school before being found out and forced to attend as students instead. This falls off, though, for much more time spent on surprisingly legitimate friendship and romance. Miina and Karen quickly befriend each other, and we get quite a lot of scenes of the two of them just opening up to each other and talking through their issues. Many of these scenes have the two of them sharing a bath, which doesn’t feel as fanservice-laden as it should. I feel like the cinematography has a lot to do with it. In some shows, the camera itself seems to be very horny. In others like this one, it’s not, so even if there’s technically some high-intensity fanservice on screen the attention’s not being drawn to it in a fanservice way.
The biggest issue for both of the girls is that they end up loving Maiku. But, of course, there’s a difference between loving him as a brother and loving him romantically, and while neither of them knows exactly where she stands, both do seem to lean towards desiring the latter. Of course, the situation is complicated – one of the two is Maiku’s twin sister. The sister can live with Maiku for legitimate reasons, as a family, but can’t pursue him as a partner (see what I mean about this not being as taboo as the pitch sounds? Family is treated as a hard-line no-go, which even some shows that don’t seem like they’d go for incest subplots fail to do at times). The other of the two is a stranger as the show puts it – she’s free to pursue a romance with Maiku, but wouldn’t normally be welcome to live under the same roof. As long as the truth is unknown they can sort of have it both ways, being in love while also living in the house, but they can’t move anything up a level.
During the middle arc, the two form the “Love Alliance” the basic rules of which are that they share any info they find with each other, don’t try to make a move on Maiku prematurely, have the sibling ultimately support the other’s attempt at romance, and keep all other girls away.
This leads to a slight little multi-episode conflict with Senpai. She seems to be attracted to Maiku, but she also has huge hangups and, it turns out, a history with the pretty boy. People, shockingly, talk to each other and work to resolve their issues difficult as they may be, which gets us to the ending realization that Senpai was just using Maiku as a surrogate and still has feelings for Pretty Boy, but that he’ll have to shape up his act if he wants them to work out in the long or even medium run.
Mind you, when I say this is a few episodes in the middle, the early phase of everyone getting to know each other followed by the middle phase with Senpai’s issues takes up the majority of the show. This is not a fast-paced show where a lot of stuff happens. It is, deliberately, the kind of show where people talk to each other in realistic manners and individual scenes and thus the arcs built out of them are permitted to take as much time as they need. Because of this, two broad-strokes arcs brings us to the last few episodes, a phase that begins in earnest when Karen ends up poking around the ruined house across the street.
It turns out that the ruined house across the street was actually the house of Maiku’s family – it’s obvious to viewers and presumably less obvious to characters in the show that the kiddie pool is not in the yard of the house Maiku moved into, but rather that one across the way. Karen finds writings left behind by the former owner, Maiku’s mother, that disambiguate the truth: Karen is Maiku’s sister, and Miina was the kid of a neighbor who played with them often (she’s actually the little girl in the photo; Karen was off-camera).
Karen decides to break a few rules of the Love Alliance and has herself an impromptu little date with Maiku, since she won’t get another chance. The truth is then ultimately revealed, which as hard as it hit Karen also hits Miina hard, as she ends up leaving the house with Maiku and Karen fearing that she’ll be headed back to the rotten life she had before.
Instead, it seems that Miina is staying over with one of her friends from school (a kind of airhead of a girl with a somewhat pervy idiot brother), trying to stand on her own so she can face Maiku as an equal. Airhead friend lets Maiku in to the idea that she might leave town, and Maiku runs after her to meet her at the station. There, they have a good talk which gets around to confessing their feelings and even having a kiss before it’s revealed that airhead friend may not be such an airhead, and instead set them both up so they would finally get over each other. Thus Miina is welcomed back into the house of the siblings (with Karen now playing, it’s unclear how seriously, the overprotective little sis role), and we’ve reached the end of the show.
It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s because Slice of Life, which this has as a huge component, slims down in a big way when summarized. In addition to Senpai, Pretty Boy, the Airhead, and her brother there are a whole host of friends at school including their teacher (also the teacher from the first show) her husband (the lead from the first show, who appears fairly little) and more beyond out to fill out scenes, tell their own jokes, and generally just have a good time. The show skews comedic, but I wouldn’t call it a comedy in the modern sense of the genre. The elements I call jokes are pushes for a lighter tone, not set-ups and punchlines to get you laughing out loud. I didn’t get to most of these elements and characters because the exact things they do aren’t important to the story – rather, their presence is important to the show’s full construction without the details being necessarily relevant.
And, through it all, you really get to know the characters. We spend a lot of time with Miina, Karen, and Maiku. We see them when they’re happy, when they’re struggling, and even when they’re at their worst. We learn what their boundaries are, how they react when those are pushed, and what they tend towards when they break. When Miina runs off towards the end of the show and the idea is pitched that she might be running away for good, this isn’t out of nowhere because we’ve seen that Miina tries to escape when she’s in a really bad mental state. When Karen steps up for her last-chance date, it’s a big deal because we know it takes a lot for Karen to stand up for herself and get proactive. When Maiku talks to Miina at the station, we know he really means what he’s saying and that it’s very important to him because we’ve spent enough time to get how he usually keeps people at arms length, and what it would take for him not to.
That said, while the time is better used than it might have come off, there are still points where the show kind of drags. There are a few too many long bath scenes, or sad inner monologues where the girls repeat that they might be Maiku’s twin but also might be a stranger to him. The show is normally pretty good at keeping some plot running, so it doesn’t fall as far as Nisekoi did, but a big part of that is that the characters here aren’t forced to grab the idiot ball with both hands in order to drag things out, and that it’s only twelve episodes rather than thirty two.
For all those blemishes though, I was still pleasantly surprised with this show. When you hear there’s an early 2000s anime and it’s a romance between a boy and two girls who might be his sister and it’s called “Please Twins!”… Well, I suppose I don’t know what you feel, but me? I was expecting Onegai☆Twins to hurt, and it never did. Sometimes it confused me, and sometimes it threatened to lose my attention, but it never hurt me the way I had expected it to.
That said, “it doesn’t hurt” is a low bar and a poor recommendation. At its worst, Onegai☆Twins is dull and forgettable. At it’s best, it’s only mildly engaging and a little bit charming. It’s a show about which I have some rather mixed feelings, but not really particularly strong feelings. I liked Miina and Karen well enough, but I’ve liked other riffs on their romantic archetypes better. I can recall them as unique characters, but I’m not entirely sure why I should. If you never see Onegai☆Twins, you’re not missing a whole lot, but at the same time if you do have any inclination to see it it’s not the sort of thing you’ll wish would give you those hours of your life back. It’s fine, passable entertainment that could very much hit the right spot if you’re in for some low-key and, excuse plot aside, surprisingly realistic-feeling romance. All in all, it gets a C from me, no more and no less.