English Dub Review: Love Flops “I’ll Charge a Snooze Fee”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

It’s time for the standard stupid cliche harem beach episode, with everyone looking for an excuse to get naked and…wait, where’d everyone go? Why doesn’t Asahi remember anything? What is Aoi talking about? What the heck is going on?!

OUR TAKE

I mean, I already know what’s going on, since I knew about the twist to this over a year ago when it first came out and was talked about, but I’m able to detach myself from that and imagine if I HADN’T known this show took place in a simulation. Well, for one, I probably wouldn’t have made it this far in to find out because the previous six episodes were still pretty awful. But if I HAD gone in blind and made it this far, I can see this change being pretty sudden and eerie, and I genuinely didn’t know it would start up this way. The first few bits just seemed like the same regurgitated harem anime sludge that I had come to expect, even down to putting Asahi in a gimp mask and chasing around naked girls, but then suddenly, after a nice heartfelt moment…almost all of them were gone. That would be an unsettling way to END an episode all on its own, but dropping it near the middle was a good way to pull the rug out, or at least slip a little like when you slip on a newly mopped floor.

Things just slowly unravel from there, with Asahi briefly losing memories of all of the other girls aside from Aoi, the only one of them left who is either also missing memories or is responsible for their disappearance. Pairing this with the cold open that shows Asahi in a flashback with a girl looking like Aoi, we begin to connect the dots that, as I not so subtly hinted at last week, all the flashbacks each of the girls had were likely memories coming from a singular source. It seems like Aoi may be that source at first, as she seems to be the more dominant personality, but then the flashback girl herself pops up again after Aoi’s botched and unhinged confession, revealing herself as Ai (heh heh, “A.I.”), someone Asahi clearly knew outside of this “world”. The placement of this twist at the top of the second half is also interesting, as it allows a lot of breathing room for the remaining five episodes to process this and explore more about it before the end. And now I’m actually more likely to pay attention to what’s happening, so that’s definitely a plus for me! Let’s see where this Doki Doki Literature Club lands!