English Dub Review: Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines “Let Any One of You Who Has Never Been Dumped Be the First to Throw a Stone at the Losing Heroine”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Mitsuki and Lemon are revealed to not be cheating, but things are not so settled with Lemon as it first seemed.

OUR TAKE

Hmm, seeing some interesting parallels between these last couple episodes and the fourth one. I mean, it’s mainly in showing how both Anna and Lemon are both not over their childhood friend crushes yet and how said crushes seem to think that Kazuhiko is dating or into…Anna, for some reason. But damn, poor Chihaya having to deal with her new boyfriend seemingly having second thoughts about dating her. And then on the other hand, I can get Mitsuki feeling concerned about Lemon accidentally confessing her feelings after the fact, but he should really get his house in order before picking at that healing wound. So, if we’re following the pattern we did with the first three episodes, the next episode or couple of episodes will probably be about Chika and her own barely contained feelings of resentment over losing out on her own crush. Then again, Chika seemed to be the one to move past things for the sake of the friend group pretty fast, though that could mean anything, especially since Anna and Lemon’s crushes have some social distance for them to really process their feelings that Chika doesn’t have. Also we have half a dozen more episodes to work with and I doubt they’ll be just about everyone doing fun high school shenanigans. I mean that will also probably be involved but still.

And since we’re now at the halfway point of the series (at least until we get word of a second season), let’s take this moment to assess how this show is going. The whole crux of the show is high school love drama getting blown up to huge dramatic proportions, so even if that does get melodramatic at times, I can’t really fault the story for being what it’s pitched as being. So I suppose my main issue with it so far is that I don’t really know where this is going. We have the inciting incidents for our three heroines, losing out on their crushes and them going for someone else, and we have some follow up for the first two and likely for the third. But after that…what then? My cynical thought would be that it leads to them all falling for Kazuhiko, but that seems like a terrible route both for the story and for these characters as people, including Kazuhiko himself as he’s still at risk of falling into the background. He’s at least remained supportive of his friends when they’re dealing with these heavy emotions AND he’s learning to overcome some of his insecurities to hold onto these new friendships, but I feel like we’re missing some major indication that he is growing as a person. But again, still have the show to go, so plenty of time to get there. But WILL we get there in the alloted time? THAT remains very much up in the air.