English Dub Review: Love Flops “Yup, It’s Risky to Go in Raw, Rubber”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Asahi, with help from Yoshino, makes his way back into the virtual world and reunites with the other four girls so they can formulate a plan to find and stop Aoi. Characters from Mongfa’s backstory have been reprogrammed to fight everyone, along with some new monsters with deletion programs. Karin regains her magical girl abilities, but so do Irina and Amelia. After making it past a certain checkpoint, Mongfa stays behind so the others can escape, getting deleted in the process.

OUR TAKE

We’re in the home stretch with Love Flops as we enter the final three episodes, with Asahi making a bee line towards Aoi. He’s back in the virtual world, with all the cheat codes unlocked so he can go in guns (and magic wands) blazing, now fully aware that it’s a facade and that the life he lived here was only part of a simulation. Nonetheless, he still wants to both protect the people in the real world from Aoi’s seeming rampage AND protect everyone in the virtual world from deletion, including Aoi. As much as Aoi’s malfunctioning is becoming lethal, it is still the result of her trying to understand her love for Asahi, both the pre-programmed and the kind she found on her own. Asahi even contemplates about how the girls he lived with were all programmed to be in love with him before they even met, and if that means that love doesn’t mean much. Mongfa tries to say that she gained new, natural loving feelings for him after their time together in her focus episode…but the fact that she still started her existence with those feelings (and not even that long ago) makes me skeptical about all of that.

And that’s a big part of why I think what the show is trying to lean into ends up ringing kind of hollow. I’m not saying they had to hate Asahi in order to seem like they had genuine feelings, but it just would have been potentially interesting to see any one of the girls be a bit more cautious or skeptical of their feelings after learning they were, at least partly, manufactured for the sake of an experiment. We’ve seen Aoi obsess over the feelings and take a turn for the worse, but there are other angles they could’ve gone with this if they had the time and interest. Unfortunately, with the plot focusing on a world ending threat and Asahi in full standard protagonist mode, as well as only two episodes left, there’s clearly not enough time to give any of that the time it deserves. With Mongfa apparently biting it, we could end up seeing a similar bloodbath next time with the other three, or we could see Mongfa revived at the end, meaning death means nothing. Either way, my point is mainly just that this premise seems kinda wasted. Prove me wrong with the next two episodes.