My first impression of OreShura?
The commercials playing on my TV were more interesting.
Maybe I should back up first.
Ore no Kanojo to Osananajimi ga Shuraba Sugiru (My Girlfriend and Childhood Friend Fight Too Much, or OreShura for short) concerns one Eita Kidou, a high schooler whose parents left him to pursue their respective lovers. (I guess marriage and parenthood just weren’t that interesting?) Eita imagines himself as a superhero of sorts, creatively named Burning Fighting Fighter. Despite his grand daydreams, Eita passes his days living with a relative and hanging out with his childhood friend Chiwa. Things get shaken up when a new girl enters Eita’s class and life — Masuzu Natsukawa. When Masuzu gets her hands on Eita dairy—filled with his Burning Fighting Fighter adventures—she proceeds to blackmail Eita into being her boyfriend.
So yes, back to my whole “boring” impression. OreShura spends the first half of the episode trying to showcase the whole “bantering childhood friendship,” but it just winds up being so incredibly unconvincing, mainly because Eita isn’t an interesting enough character to get worked up over. Chiwa is cute, but not particularly memorable either. Instead, she bounces between proclaiming her love of meat and/or Eita, neither of which is terribly charming.
The appearance of Masuza makes the show marginally more interesting, but she still falls in to the “light hair, light eyed foreigner” type that garners all sorts of ooo’s and ahh’s from enamored classmates and renders her “mysterious”. Naturally, even though Eita supposedly shuns anything to do with love, he finds himself eyeing Masuza in class. In an unsurprising twist, Masuza seems terribly interested in Eita (despite him having no particularly outstanding qualities) and tries repeatedly to get Eita to walk home with her. When that doesn’t work, she brings out the big guns: Eita’s diary, filled with the adventures of Burning Fighting Fighter, that she threatens to leak to the school.
Ah, love.
The best part of this episode is when Masuza pulls out Eita’s notebook a la Death Note style. Other than that though, the series doesn’t seem to bring anything particularly new—not something I’ll follow this season.
This series is streaming on Crunchyroll.
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manjiorin
Manjiorin is 24 years old and not nearly as cool as the characters she reads about in manga, unless they hold desk jobs and try to discreetly read manga at work. She prefers seinen manga of the bloody variety (yay Berserk and Blade of the Immortal) but d'aww's and baww's at Kimi ni Todoke. Her boringly sporadic thoughts are on Twitter and her blog.
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You’re so wrong on this. It’s precisely because Eita is not your stereotypical anime male lead that’s gaga about finding a girlfriend, is actually dutiful to his studies and responsible for his age that he IS interesting and quite remarkable. Usually it’s the female childhood friend taking care of the guy, but a role reversal is quite enough to pique my interest. Additionally, Natsukawa’s blackmailing him into being her “fake boyfriend” to ward off any more confessions of love from boys she’s not interested in is creatively ironic–she’s entering into a relationship with a boy to avoid getting a boyfriend…priceless! OreShura really feeds into my own cynical views about love and I can really relate with the characters. Yukari Tamura is the perfect voice actress to portray Natsukawa, too. I’m not yet convinced this is going to be a hit, but I’m pleasantly surprised by OreShura’s strong start.
Hmm, that’s an interesting way too look at the series, so I can see where you’re coming from, but I just wasn’t as blown away by it. I certainly don’t think it’s terrible by any stretch, it just didn’t particularly grab me, either. Perhaps things will pick up in later episodes.
The only “romantic comedy” I’m willing to watch this is Chihayafuru…and it’s not even a rom-com (Technically the rom-com is secondary but you get the point).
Maybe Sasami@Ganbarru but it has to be pretty weird to keep me interested.