Anyway, I’m Falling In Love With You is probably the more melodramatic of the romance anime I watched this winter 2025. It’s a reverse harem that tries to do things with parallel narrative threads, one in the “present” (ostensibly a couple of years in the future) and one in the past. It’s also trying to do a COVID-19 Pandemic story, with varying degrees of success.

Our point of view is from Mizuno Nishino. In the present, she’s a manga editor, but in the past, she was a high school student trying to get a romance manga published. She’s also got a small harem of guys who are all her childhood friends, who are all varying degrees of in love with her, and at the start of the series, she’s kind of obvious. For these 12 episodes, as the characters realize the social changes the unfolding pandemic will cause, the guys also realize they need to make their move.

The good part is that Mizuno’s reluctance to act, at least so far, isn’t completely a case of “I feel for all of these guys but I don’t want to hurt them (or meta-textually piss off readers) so I won’t pick one” but instead a degree of obliviousness, but not in the “Bakarina-The-Densest-Substance-Known-To-Man” kind of way. That said, there are some moments where I could see that the guys were overtly coming on to her, up to and including trying to do some thirst trap tactics, like wandering around with their shirts off. There is a bit of the refusal to choose to preserve the friendship there though, to a point where I wanted to leap into the anime with some Japanese translations of books on polyamory and leave them on Mizuno’s desk.

Probably the weirdly more jarring bit, in hindsight, is how slow the onset of the pandemic feels. We get the swim team’s season canceled, along with the festival, but everyone is still in class, in the classroom. There are about 6 people hanging out in Mizuno’s bedroom. They’re going on mall dates – and not masking. It’s not like they’re in Red State USA either.

It’s also odd because this comes up in the flash-forward sequences as well – the girl Mizuno is editing was a grade-schooler during the pandemic. They talk about how different their experiences were based on their age. Maybe this will build up over the course of subsequent seasons, but it’s head-scratching.

I liked the series. I’m going to watch season 2. However, the manga is still going, and I’m almost concerned that is going to mean that things are just going to spin their wheels in season 2.

I wouldn’t mind if they went all in on the Poly, “We Live In A World With Google Calendar”, Reverse Harem ending (especially since I’m getting vibes that some of the guys like Mizuno and each other). We’ll have to see.

Anyway, I’m Falling In Love With You is currently available for streaming on Crunchyroll.

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