What’s it about? Tokiwa’s classmate Suo invites him and two friends out to a mixer, but when the guys turn up to the restaurant, instead of the three cute girls they were expecting, they find three ridiculously handsome men in suits. It turns out it is Suo and her pals, come straight from work at a costume café where they perform in drag. Determined not to make things awkward, Tokiwa and the lads endeavour to enjoy the evening as normal.
This comedy has a case of Gender. Now, that’s a neutral statement and not (at this point) a judgement call of any kind. Last season’s Senpai is an Otokonoko had a case of Gender and a somewhat messy beginning, but (as we’ll soon discuss on the season wrap-up podcast, I’m sure) the show evolved into something very sweet and nuanced. Can I make the same promise about All-Guys Mixer? Well… never say never, but there are certainly some messy elements to this premiere that have me wary.
The emotional conflict and main source of comedy in this episode is the lads’ complicated feelings about the girls-who-look-like-guys they’re spending the evening with. The guys are torn between being attracted to the butler-girls and having their masculinity threatened by them, as it seems, by all accounts, the drag kings are much better at being handsome, cool men than the cis men are. I get the sense that there’s some underlying No Homo impulse at play in their confusion and reluctance, but the majority of the jokes actually center around the dudes’ anxiety that that can’t possibly compete. They fall on their knees lamenting how hot these princely women are. They blush and holler internally about how they can’t possibly be next to each other in a photo, because the woman in the suit will outshine them. If gender is a performance, the kings are performing it so well that the main male characters feel like they’ve been kicked clean off the stage.
Part of me thinks this is kind of fun, and kind of nice—for one thing, drag kings are a very underrepresented group in popular culture, so it’s neat to see some as main characters in a lighthearted rom-com; it’s also rare to see M/F romances where she presents masculine (beyond the so-called “tomboy” archetype, of course). In All Guys Mixer, the performers are never demonized or looked down upon for their work, in fact they’re presented as being incredibly cool and likeable, way more-so than the male protagonists. Women in suits are a very powerful force—this is a universal fact, though one not always represented in TV anime.
The emasculation anxiety of the three male leads is the crux of the episode, but in a way that makes them into the butt of the joke. At the same time, though, Tokiwa and the boys are our POV characters and anchor in the story, so to some degree the audience is definitely supposed to relate to the guys and with their flustered headspace. That in itself frames the handsome women as abnormal, confusing, and as a zany comedy conflict to navigate rather than being characters in their own right. Certainly, all of the six main characters are pretty shallow at this early stage, but the women are especially framed as quirky archetypes to react to.
The episode also runs on an unfortunate double standard about drag, where the handsome women deliberately performing as men are impossibly cool, but the one time a man dresses as a woman—when Tokiwa has to wear a schoolgirl costume as his punishment for losing a karaoke contest—it’s because he’s forced to and it’s deeply embarrassing. The series might unpack this more as it goes along and digs deeper into the culture of drag performance, but as of this first episode it just ends up reproducing an all-too-common “haha, look at that ugly man in a dress” gag that ultimately stems from, and reinforces, transphobia and specifically transmisogyny. This is awful on its own, obviously, but it’s also a startling and tonally weird pivot away from the fun and largely positive way the episode was otherwise treating drag.
The other thing that needs flagging is the… well, I want to say the fetishization of gay men, except this happens only in the abstract. One of the girls, Fuji, seems to be constantly plotting her own BL projects and wants to use both her in-costume co-workers and the guys she’s just met “for reference.” Her friend Kohaku complains that Fuji has taken way too many photos of her in butler-drag, and there’s a joke (?) where she has to haul Fuji away before she follows the guys into the bathroom (for what nefarious purposes, I’m not sure, but yay, another moment that evokes transphobic jokes and tropes—in this case the “crossdressing bathroom intruder” figure that’s common in fearmongering).
Later, two female classmates see Suo (dressed for work) leaving with Tokiwa and get all red-faced and squealy about the idea that they’re together. I’d say this show is a case of M/M relationships being fetishized for comedy, but… none of the pairings involved are actually between two men, they’re either between men and women or two women currently dressed as men. “Does that make it any better?” is a question too big for this first impressions post. There are many questions and topics too big for this first impressions post.
You can absolutely joke around about gender, drag, and attraction without stepping into awkward transphobic (or transphobic-adjacent) tropes, and if it can do that, honestly, All-Guys Mixer could be cute. At this early stage, I have no idea how it’s going to navigate all the ideas it’s playing with, so it’s worth a three-episode check to, at the very least, see how it dances across the potential minefield it’s wandered brazenly into.
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