Love Tyrant – Episode 1

What’s it about? Guri is an angel with a mysterious item that turns any two people who kiss into a couple. She appears before a high school boy named Seiji Aino. However, there is a yandere high school girl named Akane who loves Seiji.

Source: Anime News Network

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I feel as if I have been on a journey, readers. I would like you to accompany me on it, that you may truly understand my feelings.

The opening credits attempt to provide a warning for unwary travelers, crash-zooming into the breasts of one love interest while providing us a loving close-up of the other’s panties. Because it is a generous series, it makes sure we see these highly rendered undergarments from both front and back, while the opening theme poorly attempts to mask the drill coming towards the viewers’ skulls.

After that, we reach the episode’s highest peak — which comes approximately two minutes in, before the last vestiges of hope have died in the viewer’s brain. An apparent Shinigami has come to our everyman’s home with a “Kiss Note,” which protagonist Seiji cleverly recognizes is a ripoff. Because it is aware of its own laziness, you see, the script thusly elevates itself to art.

The girl, whose name is Guri, accidentally wrote Seiji’s name while trying to get two BL voice actors to kiss. This is very funny, because Guri is a fujoshi, and Seiji finds her aberrance disgusting. By contrast, he is a red-blooded man who is happy to kiss this stranger without her consent, and then accuse her of leading him on in a comical fashion. But don’t be alarmed, viewer. Despite accusing him of sexual assault, Guri also admits she enjoyed the kiss. You knew that her accusations were merely a tsundere-esque front, didn’t you? Love Tyrant knows that you did.

But kissing Guri doesn’t lift the danger, as her name was not written next to his. Nay, they must venture to the school to find someone else to kiss without their consent. That someone turns out to be Akane, who is introduced as athletic and popular in order to trick us into not seeing her major character trait: her breasts, which have their own sound effect as they swing, pendulously, from side to side. We will also see her panties before the next five minutes are up, drawn with a crisp attention to detail the series often cannot afford to its cast.

Prepare yourselves, now, for there is a further layer of hijinks to be revealed. Akane, you see, is a yandere. But before she can stab the everloving fuck out of both of the protagonists we have come to care ever, ever so deeply for, Guri writes Akane’s name next to Seiji’s. Then she adds her own, because what would a comedy aimed largely at a young, heterosexual male audience be without at least two fetish-derived young women fighting for the bland self-insert’s affections.

This has the side effect of making them all immortal, because Guri is actually a cupid who enjoys Shinigami cosplay. And both Akane and Seiji will have to help her make love matches, because the plot demands a hook. Guri’s manager (whose eyes, those cold, dead eyes, remind you that there is no joy or light left in this world) is very happy that levelheaded, heterosexual Seiji will be there to help Guri take her job more seriously, instead of doing frivolous things like creating queer couples. We can only hope that, with time, Guri will see the true light of real, heterosexual love. Love Tyrant understands that queer relationships are only the embarrassing hobby of heterosexual young women, who will soon grow out of this degenerate folly.

Also, because they are now immortal, it means that Akane can stab both Seiji and Guri whenever she likes without consequence. This is very funny, and remains so every one of the dozen times this single episode recycles the gag.

As a final twist, one more person appears from the woodwork to protest this Kiss Note business. Her name is Yuzu, and she is in love with Akane. This turn of events is, I suspect, to punish me for my hubris of wishing for more queer content this season. For Yuzu is also Akane’s blood sister, which only makes sense. Queer women, you see, are merely strange fetishes for otaku in the same way that incest is. Love Tyrant, in its wisdom, combines these things for maximum fappability. Yuzu also looks somewhat like Nanami from Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is the point at which I began to suspect this anime was punishing me personally.

Yuzu is then written into the Kiss Note as well. The opening credits imply that there will be more bodies thrown into this ever-growing meat grinder of endless, loud, unfunny slapstick. I find that I can only be bitter that Guri was not actually a Shinigami. Maybe she could have released me from this agony. Instead, I had ample time to remember that I will one day die. That, indeed, we are all hurtling through space on a rock, inching ever closer to our own lonely demises. But at least most of you lucky bastards won’t have seen Love Tyrant.