English Dub Review: Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? “Cinderella Dropped Her Panties?!”

Doki Doki Calligraphy Club.

Overview

After waking up from a spicy dream about his three club-mates, lonely teen Keiki is woken up by his sister (and club-mate) Mizuha, who sleep-walked into his bed. At school, he meets up with Sayuki, the calligraphy club leader — who gathers all the members to help clean up the club room. He is instructed to lock up while everyone else leaves. While finishing up, though, he finds a love letter addressed to him that was left on a desk — alongside a pair of panties. After consulting with his best friend, Shoma, Keiki deduces that it has to be one of the club members. He confronts Sayuki on a stairwell, Koga in the library, and Nanjo in the nurse’s office. All of them behave flirtatiously to him, so he can’t decipher who it might be.

At home, he asks Mizuha who the last one in the club room was, to which she responds it might have been Sayuki. Earlier, Sayuki had asked him to pet her hair and kissed him on the cheek, so Keiki asks her on a date in order to get to the bottom of her feelings. When he asks her if she’d been hiding anything like that, she gets embarrassed and runs away. He eventually catches her, though, reciprocating her feelings. She cryptically tells him to meet her in the club room after school.

When he shows up, she gets topless and dons a dog collar, revealing her secret, kinky double life.

Our Take

Going into this based on the show title, one could make a brash assumption that this series is bad. Going into this based on the episode title, one could guess that it’s even worse. The thing about that is, it’s wrong to judge a book based on its cover — one can never know what philosophical treasures lie beyond the surface of Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? unless we try. That’s why anime fans everywhere will be pleasantly surprised to hear that this is a show that already exceeds expectations. That’s right — it’s far worse than anyone could have imagined!

Before getting into the obvious, there are a few minor details that deserve credit. The voice acting isn’t all squeakily high-pitched girls — Sayuki’s VA, in particular, is very nice to listen to. Sometimes there’ll be a nice sax in the background music, and the backgrounds are pretty — alongside the characters’ eyes, which are all very detailed.

Okay, now that’s out of the way — everything else is garbage.

We don’t need another male-gazey, objectifying anime in the world. The main character has lines that could literally be taken out of an incel thread — complaining about happy couples for the sole fact that he himself doesn’t have a girlfriend. Yet, miraculously, of course, several girls seem to like him! Including — and God, please let this be wrong — his sister! Yup, that’s right. Scenes throughout the episode weirdly imply that Mizuha wants to bone her brother — and that she may have even been the one to have left the note.

There is only one way to save this show: flip it on its head. The formula looks, sounds, and feels like the setup for Doki Doki Literature Club (before all the crazy dark sh*t goes down.) A plain, lonely protagonist somehow has a club full of girls who are fawning over him (and also one of them is a kink freak.) Doki Doki Literature Club did well as a story because it took this trope and turned it into something new. This show doesn’t necessarily need to turn into horror, but so far, it would just be better as…virtually anything else.