English Dub Season Review: Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? Season One

 

Spoilers For Season One Below!

When does parody work? It works when all the elements in a script combine together to make a point about the thing it’s parodying. Of course, parody needs to dip into the actual content being made fun of, which is where the line can be tricky to draw. It can be hard to tell whether someone is wearing a parody mask, or if that’s just their actual face.

Which brings us to Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? — an anime about a high school teen named Keiki, a guy who spends his days lamenting about not having a girlfriend. One day, Keiki receives an anonymous love confession in the form of a letter attached to a pair of panties. It’s up to Keiki to find out who left him the letter (and panties) by questioning all of his (secretly kinky) female friends throughout the show.

…Sounds pretty anime, right?

However, when watching the show, there’s one shining light that can keep a viewer from immediately labeling it as trash. That light is the voice actors, and the hilarious spins they put on the dialogue. Combined with certain “woke” moments in the show itself, it begs the question: is Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? actually just a progressive, self-aware satire?

This may shock you, but the answer is no. The plot seems like a stereotypical, perverted story, but early on (with characters like Koga) the story gives off an illusion of expanding itself. Where in the first impression it seems that it’s simply an erotic story about Keiki finding his one true love, it starts to expand on the characters, who become the backbone of the story. It starts and then stops right in its own tracks.

Sayuki gives off the impression of a hard-working, motivated upper-classman, but all of those traits are thrown out the moment her kink (which is being treated like a dog) is introduced. Nanjo is this aloof, somewhat tsundere character whose deep dark secret is that she’s been drawing yaoi porn of Keiki and his best friend, Shoma, the entire time.

Shoma himself had more character development than most of the girls, and he wasn’t even in the majority of the episodes. He realizes that he’s been a dog who only chases after younger girls and actively tries to mend his ways by getting to know Koharu. That’s the other thing: Koharu is a character who has a stalker complex, and she’s the only likable girl in the entire show. This is probably because she takes on the role of being Keiki’s wing-man instead of trying to bone him. Despite being more of a side character, she gets a full character arc in realizing her value doesn’t have to come from Shoma’s approval. The same can’t be said for Fujimoto, who is the most pointless character in the whole show. She’s there specifically to add another flavor to the kink-salad. She gets no elaboration on her character, she’s there as a plot device so that the main cast can go to a pool for the climax of the season.

The sad part is that the writers definitely proved they could add depth to these characters, despite the weird perversion of the show itself. This is best shown through Koga, who has a very apparent reason for her domination kink. In the episode where she and Keiki go on their date, she seems to dissociate when she’s harassed by men, due to the fact that she’s a tiny girl. This explains why she feels the need to be dominant — to compensate as a means of protecting herself and feeling powerful. After this, they never further elaborated on her character and she was just a kinky joke like everyone else. However, if the show had given each character the same amount of depth in relation to their weird kinks, it would have actually been fitting and interesting to watch. But they didn’t — instead, they just had an incest ending.

Which brings us to the only reason to watch this show: the voice acting. Lord oh Lord, the voice acting on this abomination is the biggest example of a group making the best out of a bad situation. It was apparent that the voice actors knew this show was garbage, but the hilariously modern dialogue gave people an excuse to keep watching. Words like “normies” being used in a show like this is enough to give anyone whiplash, but these voice actors did an A+ job of taking something bad and making it funny without departing from the source material too much (although, it would have been better if the voice actors had just written the show.)

The art style has its pretty aspects (no harsh outlines, unique eye designs, etc.) but it doesn’t make up for the fact that the show is filled to the brim with kinky imagery and objectifying shots. The animation doesn’t do anything unique either, and with slice-of-life shows stepping up their game on innovative animation, the excuse that this show is set in a high school doesn’t really fly. Then again, we don’t need to see high school anime titties in 600fps.

Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? had quite a lot to say about the sexualization of “lolis,” dumb harem animes, and the value of love over sex, but overall, these statements were only made as a ruse so that they could simply get away with making a perverted show. It was unable to commit to these statements, and it seemed more like the voice actors were trying to save the show through the dub. At the end of the day, it was putting lipstick on a pig: the voice acting and English dialogue may have been funny and slightly progressive, but not even the dialogue could save it.

Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert, as Long as She’s a Cutie? is a perverted show with majorly flat characters and a low recommend ability factor.

But honestly, what else could we have expected?