English Dub Review: Love Flops “Could You At Least Put Some Undies On?”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Asahi finds and confronts Aoi, who gives him access to Ai’s memories within her. As he goes through her life from her perspective, including their time together and her eventually fatal illness. Soon enough, he meets a digital recreation of Ai and they reconcile before Ai’s consciousness dissolves. In the aftermath, Aoi is recovered and Asahi begins college, but then later finds four mysterious packages at his house…which are the four other girls now in robot bodies I FUCKING CALLED IT. Also Aoi is in a robot body too. THE END.

OUR TAKE

WELP. I guess my worries that all of those tearful and seemingly meaningful goodbyes and sacrifices last episode were going to be immediately undercut was RIGHT ON THE GODDAMN MONEY because yeah, no one ends up permanently dying, aside from Ai who was already dead. And I guess I’m not really that mad about it, or even surprised, but I am just a bit disappointed. Even being fully aware of this twist going in, it was hard not to already write this whole show off as just another exploitative harem show that catered to the lowest common denominator and didn’t have much to say beyond those goals. Each episode kinda just played with the same typical tropes and checked off the usual list of a harem show to the point that my brain simply checked out for the first half. Then there was the big tone change halfway through and it definitely caught me off guard as I’m sure it did with people who watched it as it was airing, so I got my hopes up a little that we would get to something a little deeper than the puddle of thematic depth they had bothered with in the first six episodes, but that only ended up getting to the shallow end of the pool.

Deconstruction and Reconstruction are words that get tossed around a lot in media discussion when discussing if a story is doing something, intentionally or not, to make a comment or change something about a particular genre. Watchmen, Evangelion, etc. Harem anime arguably already has a story that deconstructs it, School Days, where the logical conclusion of one guy trying to date multiple women separately ends up with his head cut off and in a duffle bag. And just this past year, we have 100 Girlfriends and Girlfriend Girlfriend, two shows that arguably reconstruct the appeal of a harem story by having the protagonists wanting to genuinely balance and make time for all of the women they are romantically involved with. I think Love Flops had an opportunity to do something in either direction, or both, if it wanted to, maybe with a longer episode count and some bigger ideas, but it just may have done all that it was interested in doing. But it’s time for the Season Review, which means one more go through of the show as a whole to wrap this all up. And maybe it’ll turn out I was a simulation this whole time too!