Tying the Knot With an Amagami Sister – Episode 1

Content Warning: fan service, slapstick violence

What’s it about? Kamihate Uryu (17) is looking for a place where he can study to get into Kyoto University’s Medical School with no distractions, which is why he’s taken up residence at a shrine despite being an emphatic nonbeliever. Unfortunately for him, he’s sharing the place with three shrine maiden sisters, one of whom is destined to be his future bride.

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Does this count as attempting to bribe LDP representative and sometimes cartoonist Akamatsu Ken? Is there a political ethics committee I can call about this? Do they let these things slide if the bribe kind of sucks shit?

Maybe it’ll be less obvious for people who’ve grown up with libraries where Love Hina wasn’t one of the dozen manga titles on offer, but I can’t escape how derivative Tying the Knot with an Amagami Sister is. Not just in doing what an entire bastard subgenre has been doing for 20 years, but in doing it so rotely, with the air of a pawn shop licking their thumb to obscure the branding they’re about to sell at triple the asking price.

Uryu is staying at a rundown isolated house full of girls he’s going to walk in on and trip over in various states of undress, but he’s studying to get into Kyodai, not Todai! Sure, we’re returning to an era of leering that’s nonconsensual on all sides in universe punctuated by violence as a punchline, but it’s salt instead of punching this time! And yes, it’s blatantly obvious which of these girls is the actual love interest despite the measly gestures as intrigue, but you’ll still get to see the other two’s tits! They’re even nice enough to introduce themselves by the fetish categories they represent!

Even the episode construction creaks along. Uryu is that particular kind of atheist who only exists in stories that have firmly decided that the supernatural is real, his lack of belief resting solely on a personal tragedy and assertions of “but logic!” at only the most sneering of moments. And these gods are a particularly generous sort. When Yuna needs to regret being so hard on our hapless hero, her sisters happen to have a conversation nearby about Uryu’s tragic backstory, which of course their grandfather has already told them about.

When the episode needs a minimally mammarious conflict to power its second half, a Eurasian tree sparrow swings by to pluck Yuna’s sentimental keepsake from where it is firmly tied into her hair and spirit it away (forget swallows, these little fuckers are flexing the tensile strength of an object at least twice their weight). Nobody mentions how weird and contrived this is either, despite the heavy focus on how invested these girls are in their faith. It’s Yuna’s main characteristic outside of “tsun,” and yet her response is to apologize for being “careless.” GOD SMOTE YOUR KEEPSAKE FOR MEETCUTE REASONS GIRL, YOU CANNOT PLAN FOR THAT. It’s the kind of contrivance I can feel the script humming at with an insufferable little nod, as if to say, “serendipitous, innit.”

Well, no, not really, because this world doesn’t feel especially wondrous and bursting with possibility. It’s dull corridors and temple exteriors that I’ve seen in a thousand shows before and will see in hundreds more, such that I got up and washed an entire sink of dishes halfway through just to get a break from the tedium. The blobby-verging-on-melty designs of the female leads don’t help matters—eventually I was watching older sister Yae every time she was on screen just to see if one of her eyes would finish their slow trek off her cheek and onto the floor.

The closest the episode comes to having authentic conflict is the clash between Yuna’s defensive faith and Uryu’s antagonistic atheism, which is an actual grounded and pretty serious issue for a couple to navigate if they want to spend their life together. Uryu ends up praying for Yuna, which she overhears, and it’s not a bad moment. And then, two minutes later, Uryu is right back on his Facts and Logic bullshit when an unexpected meteor shower breaks out overhead. You might argue, reading that in abstract, that it’s an acknowledgement that deeply held beliefs aren’t changed by one overture (and probably shouldn’t be). But I have sat through the 20 previous minutes of this episode, so I’m going to put the decision down to, “this is 16 volumes and still going, so any growth the characters make is as malleable as sitcom logic needs it to be.”

This is a throwback in all the worst ways. The characters are flimsy, the tropes are outdated, the art is goopy, and it doesn’t even have the grace to mimic the mania of the series it’s most blatantly copying from. There’s probably also going to be a smattering of unpleasant jokes to come centered around the fact that middle-school sister Asahi is the flirtatious and dirty-minded one (not necessarily unrealistic but always deeply suspicious in a fan service show), but that’s the enthusiastic little triangle in the symphony of incompetence at work here. Just watch an actual harem show from the moe boom, you’ll feel more respectable.

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