The upcoming anime adaptation of The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You manga is just around the corner, forming part of the upcoming Fall 2023 anime season. The manga created by Yukiko Nozawa and Rikito Nakamura was announced to be getting an anime adaptation back in March.

With the anime on its way in October, here's a rundown on what to expect from the series that's set to premiere on October 8.

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Plot and Background

The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You manga is written by Rikito Nakamura with illustrations by Yukiko Nozawa, and it made its debut in Shueisha's Young Jump magazine in December 2019. As of July 2023, the ongoing series has been collected into 14 volumes. The story follows Rentaro Aijo, a teenage boy who has been rejected 100 times by people he was romantically interested in, and feels flushed out of luck; however, on the eve of his high school debut, Rentaro visits a shrine where he makes a wish to find success in romance. A strange ghost-like entity appears, claiming to be god of the shrine and tells Rentaro that all of his rejections have amassed an incredible amount of luck specifically in the realm of romance.

The god also tells him that everyone has a soulmate, but because of the luck he has built up over his life, Rentaro has not one soulmate, but 100. This is due to a huge error made by the god, who was distracted by a Ghibli movie while setting the number of soul mates for Rentaro. To make things worse, if a person is not able to initiate a romance with their soulmate, they end up dying due to the misfortune they have amassed being focused specifically on their romantic endeavors. Essentially, if Rentaro doesn't somehow find a way to identify and date all 100 of his soul mates, then they face certain death.

OTT Comedy

With a wacky premise like this, one of the main things viewers can expect from the upcoming anime adaptation is a gag-filled riot. There are many funny moments, including fourth-wall breaks, with one funny moment being when the god fills Rentaro in on the situation, and he repeats everything said to him, which makes the god annoyed because he's "wasting panels". The god responsible for Rentaro's (mis)fortune was caught up watching Castle in the Sky by Hayao Miyazaki for the first time, and because of that distraction, he ended up giving Rentaro 100 soulmates instead of just the one. Rentaro is rather upfront about his feelings and appears to be a decent guy, but he is also notoriously unintelligent, much like the lead in another anime featuring a polyamorous dynamic. After meeting the first two of his 100 soulmates, Rentaro decides that the only way is to date them both, but what that means is that he's forced to make the same decision for the other 98 – lest he wants them to meet an untimely and unfortunate end. One time, while eating lunch at school with his new girlfriends, the tsundere known as Karane Inda kept shoving hard foods into Rentarou's eye in an attempt to feed him.

A form of trope subversion seems to be at play in 100 Girlfriends, in which commonly known romance tropes in anime and manga are pushed to ridiculous extremes. Upon meeting his third soulmate, Shizuka (aptly named, for she does not speak) Rentarou presents her to his established girlfriends Karane and Hakari and tells them that if at any point it feels like he isn't living up to the promise he made to them, he will commit seppuku. Part of what forms the comedy in 100 Girlfriends is the direct references to other anime and manga titles. In the first chapter, Castle in the Sky is spoken about directly, and others include a variation of the Turbo Granny urban myth (seen in Mob Psycho 100 and Dandadan), a direct reference to the psychological manga Liar Game; comedy reminiscent of legends like Kinnukuman. Clearly the authors are a big fan of manga themselves, and with the fourth-wall-breaking nature of the characters in the series, a level of overlap with the real world can be fun.

"Fan-Service"

Some aspects of the comedy 100 Girlfriends are quite dated, given that it's a harem anime, a lot of exaggeration and sexualization of the characters, particularly in instances intended to be comedic. In many ways, the series follows the same structure as any old harem anime, but bumps everything up to extremes, so even things that were innocent enough on the surface wind up becoming "lucky sukebe" moments (and therefore, exaggerated violence for laughs will be a common thing to expect). The vice-principal at Rentaro's school is also creepy, and her entire character exists solely to harass students who dare run in the halls. On top of that, the series itself feels like a visual novel in which every possible character archetype is presented with the guaranteed "good ending".

On the other end of the extended concept of fan-service, the main character is intended to be a wholesome protagonist, a genuinely good and nice guy whose purity stuns those around him. He's someone who is interested in romance as the development and nurturing of relationships; so he's also made out to be honest to a fault. He's the generic self-insert MC who actually has redeemable qualities, and while it is a literal deus ex machina that has both kept him out of a romantic relationship until the start of the series, and also is what initiates them, the narrative attempts to make Rentaro's good nature to be the reason for the girls' attraction to him.

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