Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? – Episode 1

Content Warning: nonconsensual groping

What’s it about? Natsume Yu and Inuzaka Himari have been inseparable since middle school, when Himari helped Yu get his now-thriving flower accessory business off the ground. They’ve vowed to stay best friends their whole lives, but the arrival of a new girl who might be interested in Yu will put that to the test.

I was so excited when I saw the title of this series. What terrifying hurdles would this friendship be overcoming? Conspiracy? Natural disasters? Aliens? Imagine my terrible disappointment when it turned out to be something both more terrifying and more unspeakably dull: compulsory heterosexuality.

I joke, of course. The very act of asking the question as the title of your show presumes an answer (see also Tada Never Falls in Love or the upcoming There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover Unless…). The title houses the conflict that has to be transformed, and the genre trappings tell us what that will mean. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of cutting to an Always Sunny title card. If that weren’t enough of a clue, the full Japanese title (Danjo no Yūjō wa Seiritsu Suru? (Iya, Shinai!!) includes a helpful little postscript to erase any confusion you might have.

Admittedly, I have a fairly high bar for boy/girl rom-coms. I had to remind myself multiple times that Toradora came out 17 years ago now, so it’s not actually a sin if other people set out to make shows about complicated love tangles about helping the person you’re clearly into try to get with someone else. Those other shows won’t be adapted by Okada Mari or come out just in time to peel back the layers of an oversaturated genre, but people can make them, and probably there’s a generation of fans who don’t yet consider these tropes done to death yet. It doesn’t help that the show sometimes feels like it ought to have aired in 2010, particularly during an agonizing “it’s funny if it’s a girl doing the harassment!” bit of boob honking.

Like the premise itself, Boy-Girl Friendship isn’t inherently bad. For all that When Harry Met Sally‘s central premise has been rightfully roasted over the years, that film succeeds because of the tremendous warmth and chemistry of its leads. And there is, I think, something to be said for prodding at the gendered assumptions around hetero dating, and how the rigid expectations of courtships often actively preclude an emotionally meaningful relationship as a core requirement. There’s a reason that one of my parameters for investing in a fictional romance is “can I imagine what these two would talk about when the plot isn’t happening.”

Like the Bechdel test, you’d think this would be easy to clear, but so many cliché romances rest on the performance of being A Girl and A Boy that it doesn’t leave room for them to be actual people. The core cast (including what will become the obvious B Couple) are broad to the point of being slightly grating, but it’s not impossible that it could turn things around down the line. God willing, Himari will even gain an eventual goal in life that involves something other than supporting Yu in his ventures.

If this show just wants to explore how dating rituals do a disservice to relationship building, then good for it. It’s just a shame that stories about how romantic relationships should also involve shared interests and respect manage to completely eclipse stories about platonic relationships, creating the false narrative that it’s impossible to be friends with someone if you could potentially be attracted to them. That assumption has an awful lot more to do with societal sexism and the presumption of access to women’s bodies, plus harmful and unfair narratives that tell boys they “can’t control themselves” when it comes to sex drive. Or, put another way: the bisexuals say “git gud.”