Alternative title(s): Make Heroine ga Oosugiru!
Light novel adaptation by A-1 Productions
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

By mere coincidence, Kazuhiki Nukumizu witnesses his classmate Anna Yanami having her heart broken by the boy she has been in love with for years. Much against his wishes, this makes him the ideal person for Anna to vent her frustrations to, sparking the beginning of a peculiar friendship.

Aqua’s verdict: One Loser Hero Too Many

One of the most annoying characteristics of modern anime we are constantly compelled to call out is the medium’s tendency to have its cake and eat it, too. There are myriad examples of anime pointing out exhausting clichés in their own narratives, only to fully indulge in them as well, and in recent years, this proclivity has become so overwhelmingly common in certain stories we could almost consider them to be a subgenre in and by themselves. Anime like My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU will cart out the same clichés viewers have come to expect from high school romantic comedies, but rather than the usual oblivious every-man or misanthropic sad sack will feature as their protagonist a genre-savvy geek who recognizes the scenarios happening around him as tropes from the light novels he loves and adapt his behaviour accordingly. It’s easy to confuse this kind of writing for self-aware or even clever, but in reality it often comes across as smug, and in many cases even more patronizing or infantilizing towards the various female characters — or, to use the proper terminology “heroines” — featured, presenting them towards the audience as puppets pre-programmed to re-enact archetypical scripts so our big-brained protagonist can point out just how much their manufactured behaviour doesn’t match that of any actual person in the real world. Gee, I wonder why that is.

Makeine comes dangerously close to being this kind of show, with its insufferable protagonist Nukumizu incessantly monologuing about the degrees to which his life and the lives of those around him resemble this or that trope from the cornball light novels he gobbles up like the junk food they are. The world around him enables it, too. Of course his home-room teacher is an incompetent, blubbering twentysomething who can’t get a date. Of course his younger sister reveres him like a demigod and showers him in affection. Of course the literature club he joins is a front for a boy’s love appreciation society. Platitudes onto platitudes onto platitudes, all so Nukumizu can sigh and snark his way through a life designed specifically to confirm his world-view, thoroughly dismissive of the perspective and humanity of the people — especially the women — around him. They’re just archetypes for him to either appreciate or roll his eyes at, like the various “heroines” vying for the protagonist’s affection in a rom-com light novel. It’s a deeply cynical way of pretending to be satire, eerily reminiscent of the way some radicalized young men on the Internet nowadays view the world as if they’re living in a computed simulation, surrounded by “NPCs” or “non-player characters” — simulacra of human beings who act in accordance with a limited number of fictional tropes, rather than with the wealth of beliefs, values and emotions that make human beings, well, human.

Fortunately, our main character’s crappy attitude towards them does not make the titular losing heroines of Makeine any less entertaining. Anna’s shenanigans are legitimately funny, thanks to debuting director Shotaro Kitamura’s impeccable sense of comedic timing and A-1’s stretchy, bouncy animation taking inspiration from the zany manga adaptation by the artist Itachi — who previously turned Haganai from a bog-standard rom-com into a slapstick riot — over the rather generic look of the original light novels, and the girl gets in some good zingers at Nukumizu’s expense to even the odds. Despite being framed in-universe as a living plot device, Anna does seem to have agency of her own, and Makeine strikes a critical balance between inviting the audience’s compassion for her plight and poking fun at her for her profoundly naive and self-absorbed views on romance. The other “heroines”, though significantly easier to fit into comprehensively labelled boxes, are similarly brought to life through charming performances and excellent character animation, betraying a certain sense of empathy that our protagonist, for now, seems to noticeably lack. One can only hope they’ll be the ones to put him through the wringer and change his perception as the story unfolds, as opposed to the other way around.

At the start of its seasonal run then, Makeine seems to find itself at a crossroads already. On one hand, it’s a surprisingly likeable comedy, a great example of how to endear an audience without relying on aggressive bombast and an easy recommendation to fans of, for example, Kaguya-sama: Love is War, a series author Takibi Amamori cites as their greatest inspiration. Yet as if afraid of being exposed as a derivative product that doesn’t even come close to reinventing the wheel, this show is also compelled to consistently pop its own balloon or rain on its own parade. When the narrative introduces an engrossing character, expect Nukumizu to point out that she’s just a “heroine”. When it tries to tug at your heartstrings, he’ll be there to “uhm, actually” that he’s seen it all before. Even when Makeine indulges in clichés — which it often does — the fucker will roll in to make sure you know. Yet smothering criticism in the crib doesn’t work if you still go out of your way to attract said criticism. Watching Makeine sometimes feels like watching a writer arguing with themselves, in the guise of its miserable leading man. Should a story be familiar or transgressive? Are tropes good or bad? Do characters exist for the sake of the audience, or for their own? Can I have my cake, and eat it too? For this show to live up to its potential, it will have to take back control from a protagonist hell-bent on sabotaging his own story. Too many losing heroines? More like one loser hero too many.