More Than 280 Minutes But Not Worth Watching
Who thought this was an appropriate idea?
Tags: #AnimeWasAMistake #MoreThanAMarriedCoupleButNotLovers #Series #FanService #Help #Why
Alright, it’s another month and again we’ve found ourselves on the wrong side of the internet. We were recommended More Than A Married Couple, But Not Lovers (Udon Entertainment 2022) and so we checked it out. It was ███████.
We’ve reviewed some weird things here at Daughters including Wedding Peach, Behind Your Touch, and Behind Her Eyes, but this anime has us reaching new levels of cringe. When people complain about anime, this is what they are talking about. The whole plot seems crafted specifically to maximize the amount of fan service the artists can produce. Fan Service is an added element that is most commonly created to appeal to the male gaze depicting young women, and sometimes underaged girls, as hypersexualised or partially-nude, or in suggestive situations or positions. It usually detracts from any character development and plot progression. More Than A Married Couple is 2% plot and 98% gross sexual objectifications of female high school students.
To summarize, the main characters of this anime attend a school that forces the graduating class to live together. One male and one female student move into apartment-like dorms and participate in a couple’s training program. The marriage practical aims to help them develop the alleged skills necessary to succeed with a long-term relationship. This is part of their grade. The students are ranked based on how many points they score as a couple for doing various activities together. The drama in the anime is that the main characters are not paired with their crushes. Yes, that’s the actual plot, or lack thereof.
The fact that this anime is originally a manga that an entire production crew has green-lit to get animated, is mind boggling to say the least. There are so many implications of this school-sanctioned ‘training’ that are problematic at best and rightout abusive at worst. We typically save this for the end of the article, but you should not watch this.
More Than a Male Gaze But Not a Real Perspective
One of the immediately obvious problems from the first episode is that these are high school students. They may be graduating and going off to university, trade school, or a job next year, but they are all probably under eighteen at the time this show takes place. The sexualisation of minors starts approximately five minutes into the first episode when the female lead walks past the male lead. While the modifications this school allows to its uniforms are wild, we’re not here to judge her bodily autonomy. The male lead, however, immediately slut-shames her for her appearance.
The female lead, Akari, is often depicted as walking around the apartment in just her underwear, but what woman would do that when she is living with a stranger? It can only be for the fan service, as this often leads to the male lead and Akari getting into suggestive situations or poses. Her appearance as a whole epitomises objectifying women.
Akari does not have a personality outside of how the men in her life view her. Her character centers on appeasing to and pleasing men. Most of the female characters only think and talk about men. The only exception is the one lesbian character, who happens to be a tomboy, because her appearance is not needed to serve men. Bechdel test who?
More Than a School Project But Not Responsible Education
Let’s not forget, this is a school activity. The students are randomly assigned these partners and are graded on how well they interact with one another. Those grades are put up for THE WHOLE SCHOOL to see. The students might fail their senior year because they can’t live with some random other student.
How do they score points, you may ask? Key relationship activities include, sharing household chores, doing grocery shopping, preparing meals, holding heartfelt conversation, comforting each other in times of need, flirting unless forced, romantic gestures, physical intimacy unless forced, and any other activity by one partner that causes the other partner’s heart rate to increase. Couples can lose points by arguing, fighting, or ignoring each other. So, if there are abusive situations, the school apparently does nothing but ‘punish’ the couple with a reduced score. What. The. Flying. Flamingo.
How does the school know when to award points? There are cameras in the living room of the apartment and heart rate monitors installed…somewhere. But to ensure the students’ safety, the bedrooms have fingerprint locks on them, and supposedly no cameras. Of course, no one is watching the cameras, allegedly. The school has an automated monitoring system…whatever that means.
This system that this school has implemented raises so many questions, such as how did they get the government (local or otherwise) to ok this, what do the parents think is happening and are they ok with their seventeen year old living with a possible stranger. The dorms seem to be on the school campus, and the students spend most of the year living there, but what about the bills for these apartments or the groceries that the students need? Ethics and morality aside, the practicality alone of implementing the marriage practical would have tanked this program before it got off the ground. We could go on, but this would get out of hand.
More Than Sexism But Not Subtle
To top it all off, like the manga artist, the protagonist and his male best friend, are raging misogynists. Every conversation after the start of the marriage practical is about how intimate the male lead has been with Akari or with his childhood friend, Shiori. Despite his discontempt towards Akari, he still treats her like a sex object because ‘all men think about one thing’. At the same time, he thinks of Shiori as more valuable and as a more worthy partner because she is more reserved and conservative in how she dresses. He effectively puts women into a hierarchy of the undesirable ‘slut’ and the desirable ‘virgin’.
We could spend another few paragraphs just talking about the male lead’s incel best friend, but we will spare you the details and highly recommend you just stay away from this show altogether. Yes, he’s that terrible. And yes, he thinks it’s women’s fault and not his own. Gotta love a man with no accountability or self-awareness…
More Than A Mistake But Thank F*** Only One Season
We don’t need to say it again, but we will: DO NOT WATCH THIS. DO NOT DO IT. DON’T. This is genuinely the first piece of media we reviewed that is uncomfortable to watch. If you watched this and enjoyed the show, we seriously wonder about your wellbeing and perhaps check in on your internalised misogyny.
We cannot believe that this project was greenlit. It’s a little bit difficult to believe the manga was greenlit, as it cannot be any better. The anime, however, had to go through so many more hands before it was released, that it is simply confounding.
THIS IS A BAD SHOW. DO NOT WATCH. Hayao Miyazaki was right when he said, anime was a mistake.
Image Credit
Udon Entertainment [@udeonent] (2023) “✨NEW MANGA ANNOUNCEMENT✨MORE THAN A MARRIED COUPLE, BUT NOT LOVERS by Yuki Kanamaru, coming from UDON in 2024! Licensed by Kadokawa, check out the anime on Crunchyroll now! More details to follow! #manga #mangacollection #udonent #udonax23 #readmanga #comingsoon #morethanamarriedcouplebutnotlovers #夫婦以上恋人未満 #ふうこい #ふうこいアニメ #ふうこいネタバレ #fuufuijoukoibitomiman” 2 July, https://www.instagram.com/udonent/p/CuNE4YIBSHb/?hl=en-gb