More Than a Married Couple, But Not Lovers (2022)

[夫婦以上、恋人未満]

Director: Takao Kato, Junichi Yamamoto
Studio: Studio Mother
Starring: Saori Onishi, Seiichiro Yamashita, Saki Miyashita
Episodes: 12

Synopsis:
A loser and a popular girl are paired up in a marriage simulation and have to play the part of a happy couple in order to get reassigned to the partners they really want.

Impressions:
I don't know why I put up with frustrating, unfulfilling romcoms, but I do. You see the well-worn tropes lined up and you know exactly how things are going to go. The thing is, if the love triangle aspect was executed well, the romance might have been at least mildly interesting, but neither Jirou nor Shiori act on their established mutual attraction to any appreciable degree until an 11th hour scramble, which destroys any plausibility to posing Shiori as a rival to Akari, and Akari's infatuation with her crush Minami is so shallow that it carries no weight as a counterbalance to her romantic developments with Jirou. This makes the other love interests more of a distraction than a proper source of conflict. So what we're left with is a dithering loser like about 90% of all male romcom leads and a tsundere gyaru flustering each other until things inevitably get tied up in a bow at the end (though not the end of these twelve episodes, of course).

We also have the premise of pairing opposite sex minors in an apartment loaded with cameras as a mandatory part of the curriculum that's so rife with ethical concerns that you're just going to have to ignore all the problems if you want to derive any enjoyment from the show. Actually, if the ethics of it were addressed in a more realistic fashion and there was proper oversight and consequences for some of the shenanigans that go on, we might actually get some conflict that the romantic situation fails to deliver, but it's clear the scenario the author wanted to deliver, regardless of how much it breaks suspension of disbelief to get there. (I want to joke, as I did with Darling in the FRANXX, that the hidden agenda is "Teenage pregnancy will save Japan from its demographic crisis.")

I will say at least that the character designs are appealing and the production values are pretty good. For those of you who are interested in fanservice, this coming from a seinen manga, the series is more up-front in that regard. Maybe that's a selling point for you. In the final tally, this series brings nothing much new to the table and is just one more in a long list of romcoms that disappoint in both the rom and the com. Maybe you'll find just enough to warrant a watch, but it fell short for me and so I say take it or leave it.

Rating:
50/50