Review of Junjo Romantica

I have a poster of this series on my bedroom wall, I ordered volumes of the manga straight from Japan, along with some CD dramas, and all three seasons of the anime on DVD. So it's about time I ripped the first season to shreds. Let's start with the core concept. The story is told by the 18-year-old Takahashi Misaki, who moves into the house of his brother's best friend, the 28-year-old Usami Akihiko (Usagi). Usagi has been in love with Misaki's brother for years, but when he gets married, he decides that he'd be better off screwing a completely normal, heterosexual, 18-year-old boy, because ifsimply being gay wasn't enough for the audience to call it quits, being borderline pedophiliac must do the trick. Misaki somehow survives the first encounter (for which he has my respect), but afterwards reacts to Usagi-san's advances with hysterical fits of rage; this doesn't stop them from having sex at least once per episode, though. During the season, Misaki starts to develop Stockholm syndrome, which becomes incurable by the end of it, when the concept of Usagi breaking up with him results in him making a passionate confession of his feelings, worthy of a true tsundere. Oh, and Usagi-san is writing a light novel about this beautiful romance, which raises some serious questions about the original author's personal life.

There are two sideplots, too, but I'd rather not get into details about those. Although the relationship of Hiroki and Nowaki (alias Junjou Egoist) is believably written, I still can't understand why Hiroki'd fall in love with an egocentric, boring, bitter and overall unpleasant person such as Usagi. (I guess it's because he's similar to him.) But even the worst parts of these storylines are Shakespearean exemplars of contemporary romantic drama compared to the aberrated trainwreck that is "Junjou Terrorist", which is about as enjoyable as you'd expect from something with "Terrorist" in its very name. (Actually, nevermind, Zankyou no Terror exists, and as far as I know, it's not as bad as this.) Basically, imagine Usagi-san, except he's 35 instead of 28, he's now called Miyagi, and he's about 69 times as much of a douche towards his partner, sometimes going as far as to rape the poor 18-year-old Misa- I mean Shinobu. Doesn't this just sound fantastic?

Well, a normal person would jump out of an 8th story window right about now, but if you have read the first sentence, you already know I'm everything but normal.

Ratings:

Story: (6)
From everything above, you might think that the story is a giant piece of turd. And it is, I'm just really kind. Let's not talk about this further.

Sound: (6)
Usagi and Miyagi sound like Google Text-to-Speech reading the transcript, put through a filter. Completely monotone. All uke characters (Misaki, Hiroki, Shinobu) talk via frenzied shouting. Nowaki, however, is able to passionately, softly and overall perfectly say "Hiro-saaan" about 623 times.
The background music is great, but I'd rather not talk about the OP and ED. I swear I tried, but I just couldn't listen to the entire ED even once.

Animation: (4)
There are still frames lasting for 20 seconds. I get that anime often sacrifice FPS and animation in favour of more detailed character models and backgrounds, but I swear, judging from the quality of the animation, the majority of the budget was spent on blinking and mouth movements.

Characters: (7)
Original, funny, relatable and believable, but not really likeable. Nowaki raises the score here by a few points.

Enjoyment: (100)
I'm a fujoshi. That's all.