Review of Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms
Medaka Kuroiwa Is Impervious to My Charms — Dear Shinto God, can you help me get someone off the face of the Earth so I can focus on strengthening my "Clear mind, clear spirit" pure beliefs? What, you can't do that because you can't control who I fall for? That's blasphemy! "He fell first, (but) she fell harder." This trope has been forthcoming recently in AniManga these days, so it's increasingly difficult to not notice such tricks like these, which quickly become annoying to ignore. Case in point, mangaka Ran Kuze's Kuroiwa Medaka ni Watashi no Kawaii ga Tsuujinai a.k.a Medaka Kuroiwa Is Impervious to MyCharms, a rom-com so incredibly ridiculous that you might be wondering if the MCs eventually get to the "will they, won't they" moment, plain and simple?
No matter how much time you've been watching anime, there's one absolute thing that you need to know when it comes to romance series: either get to the point (like Kono Kaisha ni Suki na Hito ga Imasu a.k.a I Have a Crush at Work) or tread between the lines by being wishy-washy about it, and predictably, Kuroiwa Medaka falls into the latter spectrum by being a generic rom-com, but with a twist.
You know how in every rom-com series, especially in the school setting, there's always the handsome boy or pretty girl that is the talk of his/her own school? Well, here I welcome you to the self-proclaimed Queen Bee that is 2nd-year student Mona Kawai: her A++ looks, style, and personality all fit to impress both sexes with her easy-to-get tactics, which have all pairs of eyes dawn on her for an impression that people will not forget. Of course, this extends to her class, where the same rhetorics play all the same...until she reaches one particular guy named Medaka Kuroiwa. As much as she attempts to play her ideals all the same, et al., he does not get through to her, always shifting his focus away from her as much as possible with his "clear mind, clear spirit" mantra since he is a monk-in-training for his family's temple. Obviously, the word "romance" doesn't apply to him from the get-go, which frustrates Mona a lot. She tries her best each and every time with her goody-two-shoes personality, only to be met by the boy's cynicism of "Why is she trying so hard to win my favour when she can just leave me alone and let it be"? This then, creates the rom-com tale of an egoistic girl wanting validation against a boy who just wants a pure life, at the cusp of entering into a taboo relationship that destroys his faith all the more.
At first glance, there is just nothing going along for both Mona and Medaka, even though they're like Komi-san wa, Comyushou desu. a.k.a Komi Can't Communicate's MCs Shouko Komi and Hitohito Tadano, only taking off what's pleasant about them and filling in almost every rom-com garbage that you can stick to their faces. The endless cliché comedic gags that sometimes veer much into fanservice territory are the extent of "misunderstandings" that Mona tries to win Medaka over to her side, but the latter would not give her any time of his day, even alongside his friends Sho Kobayakawa and Yuzuru Kido, as well as Tsubomi Haruno, who's the obsession queen for Mona, and are the mediators between the two to try and make their relationship work. It's a point of irritation, really, until the arrival of rivals in the forms of Asahi Shonan (alongside her best friend Minami Shirahama) and Mona's childhood friend Tomo Nanba, which really gets the rom-com rival aspect going to persist the Queen Bee that she's in love with the Shinto boy, and vice versa. At times I just want to say that this comedy kinda falls flat on its two feet, but it's this same comedy feature that ironically makes the source material work in the first place. So have it what you will, because you'll either come to love it or hate it with a fiery passion.
It's clear that there isn't an ounce of effort when it comes to the production of the show overall. I mean, this is not like some noteworthy work that revolutionizes something out of nothing, but for storyboarder-turned-director Yoshiaki Okumura and studio SynergySP, this seems like the most mediocre to fine effort that does enough to service fans of the manga that's translated onto the small screen. It's just there, but with how repetitive the opening frames with Mona's A++ sequence really are, it turns old very fast.
About the best thing that the anime can muster is definitely in the OP song, which comes from Hololive VTuber sub-unit AyaFubuMi (consisting of Nakiri Ayame, Shirakami Fubuki, and Ookami Mio). It's a perfect song for the show and is quite the catchy tune, if I say so myself. While the ED songs with Kaori Maeda and Rikako Aida are nothing much, at least they're decent alongside Akiyuki Tateyama's OST for the show.
I remember telling myself eons ago that Kuroiwa Medaka ni Watashi no Kawaii ga Tsuujinai a.k.a Medaka Kuroiwa Is Impervious to My Charms, is a manga that's been on my PTW list long before the anime came out and was into romance series at the time. Though I can say now that with the anime, Medaka Kuroiwa is more or less a guilty pleasure than anything, if the worth is worth calculating by. It's like Mean Girls, but replace the bad with the cringes from cutesy to forced love innuendos that even I will cringe at best at how not to write sufferable characters this way.
It's an attempt at giving the rom-com genre a twist, alright, but this just isn't it.