Rent-a-Girlfriend Season 2

Kanokari really pissed people off when it first came out, but given my exhaustion with oversensitive outrage culture, I completely failed to take the outcry seriously. I only watched season one after it ended, and only then did I realize how badly I missed out. With that said, though, I’m also kinda glad I missed out, because writing for season two means I no longer have to waste time introducing the story and characters, since the audience is already familiar with the premise. And gosh…what a premise… Kanokari, morally, is utterly repugnant, and while that fact really upset me when I first started watching it,I later came to unironically enjoy it, not merely as a guilty pleasure to mock myself for enjoying, but as an actual anime. Given the amount of debauchery real people engage in, at times and in some countries, shamelessly in broad fucking daylight, I personally think there isn’t that much comparatively wrong with being a prostitute or engaging in prostitution if that’s what the pair in question seriously wants to do. What I do find something wrong with is attempting to derive, or presenting it to others as if they should attempt to derive, a positive, stable, forward-looking relationship from the position of a prostitute/client relationship. I mean, I’m not sure I particularly care for the idea of prostitution either way, but what I specifically don’t care for regarding this show is the implication that everything going on is totally innocuous, no one is going to be seriously damaged, and there are no long-term negative consequences. Frankly, girls, you should just do it. Open an OnlyFans today, or better yet, become a professional camwhore on Twitch. There really are no drawbacks. Just ask the women who’ve been stalked across international borders, or the men who’ve sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into parasocial non-relationships. The understanding of these emotionally complex, postmodern social devices is just far too simplistic in the mind of this author, and the manner in which he depicts them I would argue is actively misleading and bad for modern youth. It’s encouraging, or at least tacitly endorsing bad behavior in a way that it doesn’t really need to, and while, luckily, it does suggest via Chizuru that no one really could, should, or would operate like this for long in a perfect world, and those involved should always be trying to decouple and break away (literally the plot of the show), it isn’t direct enough with its messaging, and it excuses itself far too often. Throughout season one, I was holding myself back from moving to Tokyo, calling the police, and getting this fucking guy arrested. I was admittedly drinking a little bit, but I still don’t think an anime has had me cursing and seething this much since I had to sit through however many episodes of fucking Rottenmeier in Alps no Shoujo Heidi, because—I’m sorry—this is pure fucking DEGENERATE shit. This is encouraging young men to pay for prostitutes with Daddy’s money and catch feelings. This is advice that, if heeded, WILL hurt real, vulnerable, naive people in the real world, and it WILL jeopardize their relationships and careers, both academic and professional. It remains true that the show itself recognizes this is no foundation for a healthy relationship whatsoever, but the messaging still is never direct enough nor does it ever stop excusing its bad actors. Ruka makes public spectacle of drama, cries like a petulant little brat, commits blackmail, and gets exactly what she wants; Kazuya and Chizuru use lies to manipulate the emotions of their elderly and/or dying grandmothers, and that works out swimmingly; Kazuya is caught stalking the woman he (allegedly) loves, and she rewards him with a Christmas present; Kazuya gets a part-time job to pay for prostitutes because his parents’ allowance money wasn’t enough to sustain his spending, and this newfound time commitment doesn’t seem to endanger his education at all; I could go on. I went to great lengths in my failed Mushoku Tensei review to explain how “some fiction are about morals, they’re about learning a lesson and watching role model characters, and others are not. [Mushoku Tensei] is very much in the later category…” Kanokari, however, is very much in the former category. It’s about watching a confused, indecisive young man to whom the target audience can heavily relate learn to (very fucking) slowly but (I assume) surely learn to grow a spine and commit to a relationship with the one he loves. Therefore, since it’s untimely trying to demonstrate self-betterment, the themes and suggestions it presents to its audience should be appropriate and virtuous enough to be presented in front of—and effectively taught to—its impressionable target audience. But this is not at all the case. Indeed, as described, it is very much the opposite. It tacitly endorses all the bad behavior listed above and more, and going beyond even that, what it chooses to actively and openly endorse is sometimes absolutely fucking wild. I had always imagined that the big turning point in Kanokari’s torturously stagnant, snail-paced narrative would be the inevitable moment when the author finally found the courage to have Kazuya see Chizuru on a date with another man. I envisioned him losing his composure, grabbing her by the arms, and telling her, “I want you to myself. I love you. Quit this prostitution shit and stay with me.” I know—as if a fucking anime protagonist would ever say something that manly—but I wasn’t simply wrong. What happened was the EXACT opposite, because he felt NOTHING. Zero. He’s just like, “Ooo, no! We gotta get out of here before my friends see and my giant fucking pathological spider web of lies finally comes constricting down on my fucking throat, strangling me to death in my own sin and degeneracy! lol Whoopsie daisy!” I seriously don’t want young people to consume this and think human beings work this way, because it’s going to give them bad ideas about society. Kazuya’s reaction to seeing Chizuru with Umi on Christmas was so fucking warped, because he seemed to be suggesting that if it was a “rental date” then everything would be fine and dandy, but if this romantic Christmas rendezvous was Chizuru’s “real boyfriend” then, ooooh no, that would be devastating. BUT THERE’S NO TANGIBLE FUCKING DIFFERENCE! Sure, incels, she might fuck her boyfriend, whereas her clients aren’t allowed to touch her without *at least in theory* getting themselves in trouble with the law, but that doesn’t change the fact this line of work fucks with the psychology of everyone involved. The peak example of this comes when this fucking guy literally PIMPS OUT his girlfriend! Pimping HAPPENED in this anime, and they did it TO SOLVE A PROBLEM! “Sumi is shy and can’t talk to people. That sucks. Oh, wait! I know! We could teach her how to be an outgoing rental girlfriend! Hey, Kazuya, (guy I like) how about you go cuck me and spend the day with this softy, huh? Warm her up to the touch of a man, will ya?” Hard cut to the next episode, and they’ve started normalizing cuckoldry! But hey?! What’s the problem? I know throughout all of human history people weren’t exactly thrilled about people fucking their significant other, but we’re past that. It’s 2022. It’s time to let other bitches fuck YOUR man. So stop being a fucking bigot and embrace the times. Thus, Chizuru, being the progressive woman that she is, sends Kazuya off to Sumi and opens her legs—I mean opens her heart to Kuribayashi. The ultimate cherry on top, the final chef’s kiss to complete all this contemptible debauchery was at the end of the OP, because we get through our delightful ninety seconds of all these romantic situations, and then the camera just pans down to a fucking check. A fucking BILL for like hundreds of dollars worth in yen, and it just left me stunned, because…what on Earth is happening here?! The commodification of love?! Does human interaction mean NOTHING to these people?! Does it all just boil down to dollars and cents?! Seeing that made me angry, but even more than that, it made me worried, because the viewers watching this need to be pulled aside and told, “This isn’t good. This is bad. Please don’t operate your lives like this.” I’m sorry, but it doesn’t hurt to stress this somewhat excessively. PLEASE, because the target audience here should not be led astray like this. They need to be protected from these suggestions, because they….well, you know…they’re just not that…well…nevermind. I don’t want this review getting deleted. Anyway, by the time I got to season two and had come around to appreciating the little bits of heart and soul the series had to offer, I was much less outraged by the immortality of it all. I mean, that still didn’t necessarily eliminate my reaction to any of it, but it was less shocking. Throughout the second season, I was still continuously compelled to verbally lament, “This is a man who cheats on women.” He’ll be doing something that in any other context would seem utterly sleazy and manipulative, but which is now attempting to be written off as acceptable because of this whole rental girlfriend scheme…which is itself completely unacceptable when they’re involving this much obvious emotion and boundary-pushing, not to mention more deeply intertwining people like Sumi who is far too pure and innocent to safety and healthily work as a prostitute. I’ll just be watchin’ a scene, sippin’ blackberry moonshine like a fucking Greek philosopher, and have to pause the episode, recoil in disgust, and mutter under my breath, “Ugh, what a fuckin’ scum motherfucker…” Ruka is over here like, “Don’t you feel bad asking me to let you cheat?” And he’s like, “It’s not cheating, though!” Implying rental date =/= “real” date, and I’m just bottling up screams, BECAUSE IT DOES! You’re leading this chick on while lusting after some other woman! You are a scumbag who thinks with his dick and has no appreciation for the emotions of the women in his life! The best scene to discuss as a segue into season two is also the scene which first started winning me over, the scene which first suggested the show had at least some modicum of intelligence about itself, and the scene which, I think many would agree, simply contained the best writing of the entire first season. This of course is the scene in episode twelve where Mami, having finally figured out about this whole rental girlfriend scheme, takes Chizuru on a date, and the way this was presented, to me at least, felt like real, convincing, not-the-kind-of-thing-you-typically-see-in-highschool-anime drama. When I finally stop talking about themes and emotions and actually at some point begin discussing the plot, I’ll be sure to spend time talking about the comedically ridiculous, parody-level coincidences and contrivances that happen constantly throughout the series, and this was the first scene to truly break that mold, because this is the kind of shit a vindictive ex-girlfriend would actually do. She would stalk Twitter feeds and shit, get in on the gossip, spot certain people spending time together at certain social destinations, put two and two together, and take it upon herself to utterly humiliate the current girlfriend as much as she possibly could for no one’s satisfaction but her own. The scene also works thematically, because, dear reader, if being a rental girlfriend is just a job and nothing to feel funny about, then why does Chizuru feel so claustrophobic in the karaoke parlor with Mami, and why does she feel so grossed out by the things Mami is asking her to do? She’s just singing karaoke, right? Wrong, she’s selling her dignity to someone who’s forcing her to do things she doesn’t want to do and presenting herself as if she’s not feeling the emotions that she’s actually feeling—AND THAT’S NOT NORMAL. The scene perfectly exposed the corrupt and dangerous nature of the rental girlfriend profession to perhaps its greatest advocate in the series while simultaneously forcing me to appreciate that for all its ridiculousness and all its shortcomings, this series had at least one solid cast member. Mami, simply put, is an extremely relatable and believable character. I had noticed this long before that scene, but certain things she would do had always struck me as strikingly well-characterized. I’ve cited this example time and time again, but watching her was like watching Light Yagami twirl his pen around his thumb while contemplating deeper thoughts during class. Obviously, twirling your pen around your thumb is a sort of habitual nervous tick which many people have developed; it’s not like I thought up until that point that I was the only human being on planet Earth who ever twirled their pen around their thumb in school. But when I first watched Death Note, I was a teenager with a superiority complex just as Light was, and seeing him do that while I was in the process of doing it myself, neglecting the homework on my desk, twirling my pen around as I seriously entertained his utopian ideals in my head…I can’t even describe how surreal of a feeling that was, and seeing some of the things Mami did throughout season one of Kanokari came close to giving me similar feelings. All the moments of Yuuki Aoi sounding completely emotionless and dead inside, all the shots of Mami peeling off away from the friend group to go stand in a corner somewhere and anonymously type angry shit online. She just had so many real-feeling moments of, “Oh, I have done exactly that at some point in my life.” Mami just stood out to me as this socially unhinged BPD psycho bitch that I could really see myself in, and while other characters are certainly less inspiring and much more anime-like—*cough* Sumi—Kanokari still does a better than average job at presenting bits of characterization most other anime of its type simply would not. I mean, even the mere admission that a girl could or would put on a romantic act to earn money from lonely virgins is itself fairly daring when you think about how committed most romcom are to the pure, 100% escapist school of anime writing. While aforementioned characters who stand out as particularly unrealistic definitely fuck with this balance a little bit—*cough* Sumi—it still does a lot for my immersion and my willingness to invest in the main cast when there is a clear and distinct difference between Chizuru as a rental girlfriend and Chizuru as her genuine self, both in animation and in her voice actress’s performance. The character who simultaneously makes and breaks the show is of course everyone’s favorite clinical retard, Kazuya, because as soon as season two kicks off, we’re made to appreciate what I assume is going to be the status quo forevermore: the more honest he and Chizuru are with themselves about the fact that they like each other, the less honest they are with one another, and therefore the more weird fucking shit they do to divert from a direct confession. The problem with Kazuya is I suppose quite typical, it’s just the excruciating pacing and mind-numbingly stupid contrivances which have become the infamous hallmarks of Kanokari simply make his issues out to be more frustrating than they might be under other, similar circumstances. Kazuya is your average, inexperienced, weak young man; he is a boy with no spine whatsoever who consistently allows both his male and female peers to walk all over him; and, crucially, he is true to form in that if you provide him with even the slightest hint of pussy, then he is on that shit like a fucking police dog. This is all, of course, very much to his own disservice, because any time he stands up for himself or appears even somewhat decisive for even a second, all the women are like, “Wha-woah! D-do I actually like this guy???” I like this approach, because not only does it serve as a lovely lesson to teach its target audience how to act desirably around the opposite sex, but it successfully depicts to the audience why Kazuya’s wavering levels of decisiveness are frustrating to us AND the characters in the story, thereby lending itself some right to call itself self-aware. You see, this guy would do all the things he does and make all the concessions me makes for ANY girl, but no girl wants a guy who would put himself out for ANY girl. They want a guy who would put themselves out for just them—who’s gonna stand up for you, not that other bitch. If you go watch full-on harem anime, the main guy is always presented as being platonically nice to every girl so he doesn’t come across as some weird man-whore, but he’s still nevertheless presented as being able to get all the girls to love him merely by showing these acts of kindness alone—which is fucking stupid, escapist, porno bullshit for reasons we just discussed. Real girls want real attention, not simply platitudinous Mr. Nice Guy shit, so applying this harem logic to a romcom which is trying to take itself somewhat seriously, with female love interests which are for the most part—*coughs* Sumi—characterized believably, is what I would say primarily makes viewers of Kanokari understandably want to tear their fucking eyes out. Seeing Kazuya say or do anything decisive or committed in any form or fashion is such a breath of fresh air, but then it’s choked out of your lungs when the author decides, actually, maybe a hundred, maybe even two hundred, maybe even three hundred more chapters of torture are in order, so buckle up. Kanokari is a perfect example of a series which is absolutely fine at being exactly what it’s trying to be, it’s just that what it’s trying to be is a mega generic romcom based on a long-running, cash cow manga…which is honestly, above everything else, my biggest single complaint with the series as a whole. It’s yet another anime that feels like it’s based on a manga that was very intentionally designed to last forever. I said this back when I first watched season one two years ago, and I’ll say it again now: there was never any hope that this season was going to reach any kind of satisfying resolution. I don’t know if its popularity will be sustained for future seasons; I won’t read the manga; the final episode does not leave you with any ultimate catharsis whatsoever; and while there might be slight progress and trivial drama which we can discuss endlessly, nothing here is gonna leave any particular impression. At the end of season one, Kazuya does the, “I love you!…………(credits roll and you think real progress was finally made)…………(after credits scene starts)…………uuuuuuuhhh but just as a rental lmao!” And you’re like, “Oh, okay. I don’t know why I’m surprised by that one. I’m gonna go drink bleach, hang myself, and slit my wrists all at the same time. Thanks, anime.” But in episode two of season two, he tells her straight up, “The real you is my ideal woman.” Period. No notes. He just says it outright, and here we fucking are ten episodes later and the misunderstandings are still running strong. Like, the amount of willful ignorance or sheer, diagnosable mental retardation these insufferable children must be afflicted by at this point is through the fucking moon. If you do as I did and simply invest in the characters no matter what fuckshit the story throws their way—or directly your way for that matter—then most of the contrivance nonsense is all stuff that, if you turn your brain off, very easily becomes ignorable white noise that quickly fades into the background. However, no matter the expertise with which I was able to incrementally sip my moonshine to keep a consistent buzz, there was some moments throughout both seasons that were simply too much, and I could feel the alcoholic implosion of my brain significantly accelerated by sheer anime absurdity. I feel now is a good time to warn you that not only did I watch this series consistently buzzed, but also at a leisurely 1.6x speed, so if you watch with neither, then your milage may vary drastically. My first complete and total breaking point was back in episode six of season one when Ruka firsts shows up, because she arrives on the scene with nerdy, bucktooth, glasses boy and is obviously WAY out of his league. She then accuses Chizuru of being a rental girlfriend, makes herself wildly suspicious by even knowing about rental girlfriends in the first place, AND brings this accusation up to people who are themselves engaging in the practice, and yet they somehow fail to IMMEDIATELY realize she, too, was a rental girlfriend, and that shit blew my fucking mind. That was so beyond outrageously retarded that I was at that moment convinced this was all on purpose. Again, the show is absolutely littered with little plot holes and coincidences that break it from the ground up—things as basic as Chizuru’s double lifestyle not having been found out by every single fucking person in Tokyo, a point which is, in the case of her Ichinose persona, literally backed up by Superman “just Clark Kent with glasses lol who could that possibly be” Logic—but rarely does it hit you with impossible-to-ignore absurdities such as that. It’s riddled with little things, like, “Oh, they just happened to show up there at that time? What a coincidence!” Or, “Oh, they just happened to run into them a this spot? What a coincidence!” Or, “Oh, this person just happened to be right there in earshot or line of sight to them doing this thing that concerns the former in this way and now drama this drama that? W-w-what a coincidence!” All the excuses given by the show to handwave particular contrivances are fucking laughable and don’t make any sense, so if you’re the type of person who can’t really get into, “Okay, this show is pretty trashy. I’m just gonna turn my brain off and get out of it what I know I personally can get out of it.” Then I’d recommend saving your sanity and watching another, much smarter anime. And, now that we’re fast approaching the final paragraph of this monstrosity of a review, I’m slowly realizing the position I’ve put myself in—that of somewhat standing in defense of an anime which every thinking individual seems to rightly despise for many good reasons, all of which I’ve acknowledged and even criticized myself, but none of which I’ve even attempted to outright justify at all—and I’m struggling to find the answer to the question, “How and why did I enjoy watching this show again?” Because, I’m gonna be honest here, the answer isn’t coming to me easily. This is as good of an adaptation of whatever its adapting as it probably could be, and I don’t think I need to read the manga to say that. There isn’t a whole lot of animation, but the gorgeous character designs and stylish costume designs lend themselves perfectly to the series’ stellar artwork. The author clearly wants you to think these girls are worth money—which, hey, I guess many of them literally are—and he was successful. The colors and backgrounds are solid, and the music is great, especially those in-character insert songs the voice actresses sang for. And if the obvious outpouring of effort wasn’t enough to convince you this production had some soul, I now take this time to direct you to the fucking *zawa zawa* Kaiji reference in season two. Like, wtf?! What teenager watching this trash is going to understand or even catch that??? It’s just one of those baseline inclusions that makes you say, “Well, okay, at least the people making this clearly cared.” But this is all fluff, really, because what truly got me to sink my teeth into this was all that juicy, bloody, red meat shit. That feeling when you see another woman’s purse in your ex-boyfriend’s apartment; that feeling when you imagine your ex-girlfriend hooking up with some bigger, hotter, manlier guy; that feeling when you have to talk to the guy you like the morning after you heard another girl at his place; the feeling of your girlfriend, who you’re not that serious about, having a family who truly trusts you to look after their daughter, or granddaughter in this case. The evolution we see from last season, where Chizuru kicked Kazuya off of her in the hospital bed with that big, over-the-top anime reaction, to this season, where he falls on top of her in an equally retarded fan-service set-up, yet, this time, she instead looks to him vulnerably and tells him to get off in a demure, understated voice, letting him make the choice himself. Realizing Ruka bought condoms, or seeing her force herself on Kazuya because she knows she’s losing the emotional race. Getting wrapped up in the late-night Gossip Girl shit, the drama, investing in the competition, being fucking disgusted with Kazuya; it’s all part of the process. I love allowing myself to get invested in trash like this just so it can frustrate me and force my cold, dead, icy heart to feel literally anything other than passivity and dejection, which I guess answers the question posited at the end of the previous paragraph. I wanted to rewatch and seriously engage with it, so I could sift though all this nonsense and see how much of it was dumb smut, and how much of it actually had a little amateur bit to say about relationships and love. I just made sure to leave myself an out to excuse all my actions as being self-aware, since I never hesitated even for a second to point and laugh…even though I still consciously allowed myself to invest in something undeniably low-brow, because fuck you. I’m lonely and felt like it. Thank you for reading.