English Dub Review: Love Flops “No! Not There! Not Like That!”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Amelia takes a break from invading Asahi’s personal space to reveal she’s failing Kanji lessons, so Asahi decides to help her study.

OUR TAKE

Now that we have settled into the status quo and Asahi has met all of his potential brides to be, we can now get into giving each of the girls a focus episode that will attempt to endear us to them as they flesh out their characters through surface level traits and dollar store story scenarios. I was honestly expecting us to get to Amelia a few episodes more down the line, but here we are. She’s not the typical American stereotype character in one of these harem shows, mainly because she has a realistic chest, she doesn’t have bleach blonde hair, and she doesn’t constantly go around wearing a cowboy hat draped in the American flag. But she is, allegedly, a foreigner, so her dilemma is that she doesn’t understand Kanji, the most difficult written version of the Japanese Language, very well. Therefore, her way to bond with Asahi will be through him having pity on her and helping her study, showing her resilience to overcome any challenge and her resistance to losing. That’s not gonna help her win the guy in the end since the odds are quite against her on that, but it’s good to have a persistent attitude, I guess.

And since this is Amelia’s episode, Green Hair, Orange Hair, and Definitely Not a Guy don’t really get to have personalities this week, instead basically combining together into either deactivated robots or boiled down to the sole trait of still bugging the protagonist for no reason. Aoi gets to actually have a proper scene, however, telegraphing pretty clearly from the get go that she’s gonna be one with the best chances. Also, Amelia gets the same sort of flashback that Aoi got last episode, which probably means the rest of the candidates will likely have moments like that of their own, hinting at a greater mystery in this story that I am basically already aware of thanks to THE TWIST. Do you remember how I mentioned a TWIST? Well, it’s still coming and it’s gonna help a little bit in addressing why some of these more generic and derivative details are that way, but still isn’t going to actually excuse or make up for them. The good news is that we’re already a quarter of the way through this thing, and the next three episodes at least will be more of the same, so it’s not gonna get any better, but it likely won’t get much worse either.