Holy fuck it’s over. I’m free. My sentence is finally fucking over. This season I was light on romance, so I wanted to see if The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague (yes that’s the true English name) was any good. Now I should have known from the title alone that I was in for a rough ride, but boy oh boy nothing could prepare me for the level of writing churned out on this production. The first episode was a slog, but in anime we have the Three Episode Rule which states you should at least give an anime three episodes before making a final decision as that’s still only roughly one hour of your time, the same as a single regular episode of an hour-long TV show. I try to abide by this rule whenever I can as a guy who writes reviews sometimes, but holy shit this tested my fortitude in ways I thought not possible and made me pose a question: is bad romance the worst anime has to offer?
A good romance does at least two things: allows the audience to understand why these two characters connect with each other, and poses challenges to that relationship that the two must overcome in order to become closer. So far I’m three episodes into this garbage and neither element is present in the slightest. I actually have zero idea why these two dumb fucks like each other. The guy is a stoic descendant of a snow maiden with ice powers and somehow still manages to be uninteresting as hell. The girl is so far just a normal girl, except strip every ounce of personality away. Boom, done. Watching this anime is like being stuck in a sharingan. Time dilates. Minutes become hours. You sit there as these two unlikeable, unmemorable shells of people fall in love for no particular reason besides finding each other cute. Many times there is no OST playing (rare for an anime), the characters are talking so damn slow, their eyes are shaking slightly for some reason, and you have to question what the hell the writer/director was possibly thinking.
Sorry girl, but no amount of cute pussy is going to save this experience.
At least when an action anime is horrible, you can make fun of how janky it looks. Bad dramas often also tend to be quite memeable. Bad comedies can be a hellscape, but this anime has me thinking there’s almost nothing worse than a bad romance. Thankfully I have been liberated as my duty has been done and I’ll be closing the door on this series permanently, never to lay eyes on it again as long as I can help it. Have you tried watching this anime? Are bad romances the true final boss of watching anime, or was this one merely a particularly horrid case? What anime are you actually excited for this season? Sit next to your boring coworker, take five minutes to ask her if she wants a coke, and then freeze yourself solid out of embarrassment in the comments below!
