English Dub Review: Twilight Out of Focus “A Real Trashy Boyfriend”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

When first-year student Shion joins the film club to find love, former VP Rei coolly warns him that he’ll never get a boyfriend.  Rei later finds Shion crying and, to comfort him, suggests they date.  Shion soon learns that Rei is actually a very trashy person.

Our Take:

We’ve now reached the third and final love story of the series.  Since the previous one was shorter than Mao and Hisashi’s romance, I expect this arc to last at least five episodes.  Of course, that’s considering an anime season’s usual 12-episode structure.  I’m unsure if this is really the case since I haven’t done more research on the episode count, but I would like to be wrong.

The third arc of Twilight Out of Focus shifts its focus to the first-year student, Shion Yoshino.  Shion is a hopeless romantic who attempts to find himself a boyfriend at his new school.  Despite his skills in the sports area, Shion only joined the clubs to find love and nothing else.  But that changes once he joins the film club, where he confronts visual artist Rei Inaba, who tells him that he won’t find love in a group whose only passion is filmmaking.  Unsurprisingly, Shion doesn’t take his warning lightly but falls for Rei anyway when Rei suggests they date.  However, it was eventually revealed that Rei only made that suggestion to satisfy Shion’s goal.

With his kinky and outgoing personality, Shion may come off as slightly annoying at first, mainly due to his selfish desire to find love.  But after seeing Rei as a potential “boyfriend” despite his trashy persona, we see Shion as someone who hopes to finish what he started instead of quitting when things don’t go his way.  Of course, this starts with Shion attempting to make Rei a better boyfriend by going on an actual date.  While not a great start to the show’s final love story, it has the potential of being another diverting enemies-to-lovers narrative, similar to Jin and Giichi’s.