The kitten was sleeping on my lap when I started this episode so I wasn’t able to write an intro with my pre-watch impressions. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint) this is a 3 minute anime paced like a 20 minute anime so nothing happened that I can comment on.
The premise has the potential to get really offensively bad, like all arranged marriage anime, but will probably serve to be pretty harmless, like almost all arranged marriage anime. The fact that it seems to be gay could be promising, but could also be frustrating if it’s the annoying, heteronormative type of gay that the use of the word ‘yome’ in the title implies it will be.
There hasn’t been anything to turn me off of it so far and the characters designs are fun and unique without crossing the line into annoying. The only real misgiving I have is the use of the word ‘wife’ for our male main character. If it turns out to be the harmless cute it seems to be aiming for, I might stick with it, but I also might not. It’s really probably going to come ’round to what the fuzzy dude is like, how he treats Our Hero, and how heavily the series leans on gendered expectations for the role of ‘wife’. It could be fine if Our Hero is established as enjoying cooking and cleaning and such, but all we saw of him in this episode were him getting dressed and walking to school so it’s all still up in the air.
If this turns out to be a cute, domestic romance about an arranged partnership between two equals gradually getting to know each other, that’d be great and I’ll stick with it. But if it turns into a whole lot of ‘lol he’s a boy doing dishes let’s put him in a dress while he protests and looks all flustered and cute’ then I will not. I guess we’ll see how things look after a couple more episodes.
Ace Anime Reviews 