Love Flops


Love Flops is an original Japanese anime television series produced by Kadokawa Corporation, animated by Passione, and directed by Nobuyoshi Nagayama. It follows a high school student whose life is turned upside down after he has a fateful encounter with five girls on his way to school.
The series aired from October to December 2022 on AT-X and other networks. Sentai Filmworks the licensed the series for English-speaking regions, streaming it on its Hidive platform with an English dub that premiered in November 2023.
A manga adaptation by Ryūdai Ishizaka was serialized in Hakusensha's Young Animal magazine from June 2022 to July 2023.

Plot

One day before going to school, Asahi Kashiwagi watches a fortune telling program on television. Every prediction turns out to be true when he encounters five girls along the way, with each one eventually giving him a love confession. Asahi now has to find a way to deal with this unexpected situation.

Characters

Main characters

;Asahi Kashiwagi
;Aoi Izumisawa
;Amelia Irving
;Irina Ilyukhina
;Bai Mongfa
;Karin Istel

Supporting characters

;Yoshio Ijūin
;Loverin
;Ai Izawa
;Yoshino Feynman

Media

Manga

A manga adaptation illustrated by Ryūdai Ishizaka was serialized in Hakusensha's Young Animal magazine from June 24, 2022, to July 28, 2023. The first tankōbon volume was released on September 29, 2022.

Anime

The original anime television series produced by Kadokawa Corporation and animated by Passione was announced on March 25, 2022. The series was directed by Nobuyoshi Nagayama, with assistant direction by Midori Yui and Fujiaki Asari, scripts written by Ryō Yasumoto, character designs handled by Kazuyuki Ueda, who also serves as chief animation director, and music composed by Kenichiro Suehiro. It aired from October 12 to December 28, 2022, on AT-X and other networks. Konomi Suzuki performed the opening theme song "Love? Reason why!!", while Miku Itō, Ayana Taketatsu, Rie Takahashi, Hisako Kanemoto and Marika Kōno performed the first ending theme song "Flop Around". Itō performed the second ending theme song "Lost in the white" and the insert song for episode 12, "With You". Kadokawa collected its episodes on two Blu-ray box sets, released on January 25 and March 24, 2023.
In North America, British Isles and Australia, Sentai Filmworks has licensed the series, who streamed it on Hidive. An English dub produced by Sentai Studios, under ADR director John Swasey, premiered on November 28, 2023. It was released on a Blu-ray set on January 16, 2024.

Episodes


Reception

Previews

The series' first episode received negative reviews from Anime News Network's staff during the Fall 2022 season previews. James Beckett critiqued that the series failed to replicate the tightrope concept of "nonsensical shenanigans" and sincere relationships that Wet Hot [American Summer (franchise)|Wet Hot American Summer] captured, saying the premise had "no clever commentary on those hacky clichés, no subversion of expectations, nor anything else of merit or interest". Richard Eisenbeis felt the series did not go further with its deconstruction of the lucky pervert trope in romantic comedy anime and had a "compelling mystery" regarding Asahi's surroundings being a dream or virtual reality, but concluded that "it's not enough to bring me back for week two—and neither is anything else in the show for that matter." Nicholas Dupree was put off by the "escalation of bad taste" following the episode's elongated take on the first two minutes of A Sister's All You Needs opening episode, saying "if somebody wanted to make a parody of lazy dating sim games and the ridiculously contrived ways they deliver cheap fanservice of flat characters to an increasingly desensitized audience, it would certainly look like Love Flops."

Series

Julian Malerman, writing for THEM Anime Reviews, heavily panned the series for not fully committing to its "wildly trashy premise" and ecchi harem clichés in the first half, and failed to accomplish being a "genre subversion or satire" akin to Doki Doki Literature Club in the second half, calling it "a case study in misplaced writing priorities" that's recommended to "the morbidly curious and, preferably, thoroughly inebriated."