Ghu Bless the Reiwa-era rom-com! We have, with Please Put Them On, Takamine-San!, which I’m just going to call Takamine-san going forward, a fanservice comedy that generally nails the character dynamics. This includes sexual slapstick that has consent (except one bit in the first episode)! This isn’t a bar that you’d think would need to be cleared, but it is, and it has, though its head did strike the bar.
The show is from the perspective of Koushi Shirota, a fairly standard High School protagonist who, while eating lunch alone in an athletic storage room, accidentally sees the bare breasts of his classmate, Takane Takamine. It turns out she can rewind time if she takes off a piece of underwear in public – no one will remember her doing this, and the underwear is consumed in the process. The exception is if someone sees her bare breasts when she isn’t using this ability, which Shirota has done. So, Takamine ropes Shirota into being her “closet” – carrying around spare underwear for her, and putting them on her when she uses her ability.
Right – let’s get into the Elephant in the room. Takamine gets Shirota to do this through a fake rape threat. Fanservice anime use this as a plot device too often, and this is particularly bad because the use here is gratuitous. It comes up in the first episode and never again. It adds nothing to the characters and plot, and clearly the mangaka recognized it since he doesn’t follow up (which is good, because it shouldn’t have been used in the first place). Honestly, it feels like something the mangaka’s editor had them add to the first chapter, considering how hard they drop it.
As far as the anime adaptation itself goes, it goes considerably harder than the source material. This isn’t just a matter of more nudity more often, it’s also a matter of the kinds of nudity. One of the recurring bits in both the anime and the manga is various imagined moments that either Shirota thinks up on his own or that Takamine suggests to him through lewd comments. In the anime, these imagine spots are considerably more risque than in the manga. For example, in one episode, Takamine is walking in a park at night without underwear, and Shirota runs up to provide some underwear she’d left at his house. Takamine makes a quip about working on JAV and that she’d be as perfect at as she is in everything else. In the manga, Shirota just imagines the cover of the DVD box. In the anime, he imagines her nude, with a money shot from the conclusion of her scene. Both are logical for an adolescent teenage boy to think of, but considering the manga runs in a Shonen magazine, one is less Shonen and more Seinen.
Otherwise, the character relationships are generally well written, with Shirota and Takamine having a pretty clear Sub/Dom dynamic that is written as being consensual and otherwise healthy and not abusive… except for that first episode. The fake rape allegations, or the threat thereof, are incredibly gross, and as far as fanservice anime goes, makes it hard to recommend – especially compared to something like Cafe Terrace and Its Goddesses.
Please Put Them On, Takamine-San is available for streaming on Crunchyroll, and the manga is available through Crunchyroll, Books-A-Million, and Bookshop.org (Affiliate Links).
