Review of My First Girlfriend is a Gal

This is the perfect example of a bad show I enjoyed a lot. If you take it at face value, this is a reasonably cute short romance anime. But it suffers from, among many other things, an issue of perspective. We, the audience, can hear every one of Junichi’s thoughts. We hear him being gross and sincere, horny and romantic, stupid and thoughtful. To us, he’s a fairly well rounded protagonist for the genre. But if you take even a second to think about how other people see him… woof. Junichi spends most of the show just gawking at beautiful women. We may hear himsay something hilarious and sweet, but the girls around him just see a dude with a massive erection and his tongue fully dangling out of his mouth.

Yukana carries the relationship way too much, which I suppose is the fantasy. It’s a shy guy with basically no charisma rizz up beautiful women for 10 episodes. I was embarrassed for and by Junichi every step of the way. Not to say that I hate him, but it was very clear he was liked because he was the main character, not because of anything he actually did or said.

That was my main gripe but there are many other issues with this show. Mainly, the obscenely disgusting jokes made around underage girls. One character is an out and out pedophile. The show lampshades it by calling him a criminal and other characters consistently say things like “you have to go jail” but it’s just too common of a joke about something so horrendous.

The animation is dated. The plot is predictable. The writing is consistently misogynistic. The fan service is gratuitous. But I kept watching for the few moments where Junichi and Yukana were legitimately cute. It was refreshing to see an anime romance that acknowledges that people have sex drives and desires without just being porn.

This is not a good show. You could say it’s bad. You probably should say it’s bad. But I still liked it.