天下制覇

Even for a harem protagonist, this dude is pathetic.

Impressions:

I legitimately can't tell if these harem/rom-com protagonists have gotten that much worse these days, if I've just blocked the worst of the worst from my memory, or if I've simply aged out of being able to tolerate these characters. In the old era of Love Hina and Chobits and Key knockoffs, there were certainly plenty of godawful sad sacks, especially with the sheer number of premises that were a magical girlfriend dropped through the roof who instantly became his dedicated sex slave. But I still feel like even the trashiest, the Girls Bravos or DearSes or Airantous, the protagonist still had some redeeming qualities. Hell, I can even vaguely remember what made me stick with Kimikiss. Something about a severed gorilla head and it being a lot more anthology-soap opera-y. This one opens up with the dude lamenting the crushing failure of not being able to sell some godawful trinkets, and spirals down from there when Manic Pixie Dream Girl shows up, solves everything, and spends the next fifteen minutes literally crawling all over him for absolutely no reason except that he's the protagonist while he whimpers, whines, and moans about how awkward it is to be someone's object of adoration.

He has no positive traits or redeeming qualities, and yet, the entire thing revolves around listening to him bellyache while the girls physically throw themselves at him, grope each other, throw themselves at him, and then gossip about how much they're going to throw themselves at him. It is pure fanservicey wish fulfillment, just without the panty shots or any kind of magical or gimmicky hook. It's decently animated at least, a rarity for this season so far, but good god. Skimping on the comedy to go extra sad sack and extra cloying and double extra overt manic pixie girl is not the path to characters that engender any feeling but the desire to strangle them.