Love Stage!! is one of the fluffiest BL series I’ve ever enjoyed.  The first OVA, which was released with the fifth Love Stage!! Tankoban, lives up to my fun, fluffy, joyful expectations.  The first season of the show focused on two idiots falling in love, and the first OVA tackles their first major difficulty as […]

My first instinct when reviewing this episode is to just scream “PRECIOUS BABIES” in caps lock for several paragraphs and leave it at that.  It’d sum up my feelings pretty well, but alas, I do want to dive a little further into the episode.  It pretty much had everything I was hoping to get out […]

Have you ever wanted to grab two characters, bop their heads together, and scream: “You two are in love each other!” at them until they got the point? That was basically how I felt throughout this entire episode. It’s pretty clear at this point that the love is going both ways between Izumi and Ryouma, […]

This episode spent a large portion of the time summarizing parts of the story that we’ve already seen in prior episodes and new material, including things that happened prior to the first episode of the series. We get to see more of Rei’s backstory and passed a major turning point in Izumi’s life. This also […]

It was an agonizing wait to see how the cliffhanger scene from last week’s episode would play out but the resolution to the whole debacle was quick and mostly satisfactory. The romance between Ryouma and Izumi is blossoming in an adorably sweet way despite the rocky start. They’re a couple I’m proud to cheer on. […]

We’ve come so far in terms of character development in the span of just six short episodes. While Ryouma’s questionable restraint around Izumi is still an ongoing issue, he’s evolved from the cliched pop star into an altogether caring character that I’ve developed a large amount of sympathy for. Rei isn’t just a guy in […]

This anime continues to surprise me with both how absolutely adorable it is and how much each character continues to flesh out week after week. The characters could have been simple two-dimensional beings that exhibit only the cliched trademarks of their type (otaku, rock star, etc), but things are a lot more nuanced than that. […]

This week’s episode took a weird turn for the meta with Izumi repeatedly making references to being a “BL (Boys Love/Shonen Ai) Character” and warning to not “underestimate an otaku.”  This genre self awareness was hilariously awkward and I wanted to reach through the screen and gently remind him that yes, sorry to break it […]

Love Stage!! keeps getting better and better with each episode.  Unfortunately, this episode did fall into one of the tropes that’s so prevalent throughout the yaoi and shonen-ai genres with the introduction of a scene that stands precariously on the corner of non-consensual and dubiously-consensual.  It’s a trope I try very hard to avoid, but […]

While the first episode set up the premise, the second episode seems to be setting up the tone of the series. We know who are characters are, what they’re doing, and why they are in the positions that they’re in, but now we’re getting deeper glimpses at who they actually are. We’re also to the […]