The rather long titled There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… was the big romantic comedy anime I watched in the Summer 2025 season, and I’d describe as the big “disaster lesbian” show, and I think is a series that worked out well, and I’ll be happy to watch more of.

The series follows Renako Amaori, a high school girl and extreme social introvert who spent much of middle school as a Hikkomori (likely due to social anxiety), and is trying to have a fresh start in High School. Things turn out more than she anticipated, when she ends up in a romantic relationship with a glamorous Oujo-sama, Mai Ouoka, leading to lesbian tension with some of the other girls in her class.

The writing of the series is very nicely done. Renako’s social anxiety is presented in the context of her effectively developing a harem (or polycule) of romantic interests born out of her not understanding her own sexual identity. Her not understanding her own sexual identity is also clearly connected to her own anxiety and not feeling comfortable with social interactions in general in a way where she wouldn’t have had an opportunity to develop her identity in the past, so she doesn’t know how to handle any of this. It’s a nice change from the “harem/polycule” series where the protagonist is presented as a generic blank slate for the audience to project themselves onto.

Additionally, each of the romantic interests (or possible romantic interests) for Renako have interiority. They have their own interests and hopes and fears that are separate from their relationships with Renako (though not necessarily with each other), which is what I want in a romance series. I want romantic interests who have lives before they meet the protagonist, and ideally have lives outside of the protagonist’s life, and there’s a real sense of that here.

The animation is also fantastic, with a lot of really great shots of the characters, with tremendous use of lighting and framing (including using letter-boxing) to help provide real senses of mood. Studio MOTHER, who took point on this, is a relatively new studio, having previously done More Than A Married Couple, But Not Lovers, which I watched in part but eventually dropped – but not because of animation issues. They have a passion for animating cute girls and for animating romantic comedies, so I look forward to the next installment of this series, and what their future projects are.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… was distributed for streaming on YouTube with a 1 week expiration date, so currently it’s not available for streaming, unless it gets put back up again, or unless someone else picks up the anime. So, instead, I’m going to recommend you pick up the novels the show was based on. Those are available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and BooksAMillion (all affiliate links). There’s also a manga, which is available from Crunchyroll, Amazon, Bookshop.org, and BooksAMillion (also affiliate links).

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