English Dub Review: Love Flops “Your Mom’s Inviting You For Some Baby Roleplay”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Aoi’s face begins appearing on more machines across the city, causing ever escalating chaos. Feynman takes Asahi to her house, the only place she still has access, and explains how the situation with Aoi will only get worse until either the company she worked for erases her or Asahi gets through to her. She also brings back the other girls to help.

OUR TAKE

With only three episodes left before the end, we set the stage for the final act as Asahi gets his orders to save Aoi before the company that created her can destroy her. And hey, the rest of the girls are back so they can participate in the plan! But it’s here that I think the potential to turn things on their head with the big reveal has kind of fallen flat a bit. For one, as mentioned last time, this REAL world and the virtual one aren’t that dissimilar to make good use of. Asahi is now facing reality, including that his childhood friend Ai is dead, but he’s also still basically the same standard harem protagonist. Yes, getting over a friend’s death takes a lot of mental work and that is commendable, but then we also go back to the strangeness of the simulation and how all of the girls were basically programmed to like him from the start. Now that they’re back and THEY don’t have to grow or become more complex people, or even have any further examination for why they may feel the way they do, it’s basically back to formula, just that one of the girls has inexplicably gone Yandere and has the ability to potentially destroy civilization if she isn’t either talked down or effectively killed.

I know that I shouldn’t judge a story just for how I wish it could’ve gone versus how it actually intended to turn out, but I can’t help but feel like there could’ve been a better version of this story. Like maybe the real and virtual worlds are much more distinctly different, the girls start to gain sentience and question why they like Asahi in the first place. Some may still decide they like him but others may pursue other ways of confirming their existence, and then we could see how Asahi reacts to that, whether positively or negatively, and examine that. Even one going rogue like Aoi has would be possible, though how things escalated from her simply wanting to fall in love to…possibly destroying the world is definitely something that we’ll need to get into in these last few episodes. With only three episodes left, that’s probably just enough to get a sufficient explanation, but I wouldn’t expect anything that really breaks the mold for this genre like some may have expected after that reveal.