The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends!

Eiyū is a high school boy whose two childhood friends, Shio and Akari, also go to the same school as him. He has now started looking at them with both romantic and lustful eyes, though he knows that they have no interest in him, which causes him no end of worry. However, Shio and Akari have their own secrets.

You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! is based on Shinya Misu's You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Despite what you may expect, I've long had a soft spot for pre-moe boom harem series. Multiple female characters, all with their own personalities, interacting with one another! I'm sure part of it was that, as an American teenager, I simply wasn't used to ensemble series with a larger female cast than the Designated Girl, but still. It remains that when the moe boom came along, it felt like a lot of distinctive personalities had been traded for archetypes with no interiority.

You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! says, what if we had both? What if the girls desperately chasing Eiyu's dick were intentionally acting in a certain way, in hopes that they might convince a manga reader like him to get with them? And what if the tsundere were genuinely irritable and snippy, despite her crush? It's honestly kind of an interesting thought experiment that the show entertains. When protagonist Eiyu wakes up to find his next door neighbor Shio snuggled up to him under his sheets, it looks like the impulsive choice of a sleepy girl with no boundaries, the kind we've seen more times than we count. However, as we soon see, it actually involved her getting up early and putting a lot of work into making herself look cute before jumping from one roof to the next, climbing in his window, and crawling into his bed.

However, I do have to remind you all that “interesting” is an entirely different matter from “good.” Harem rom-com antics are still harem rom-com antics, no matter how you dress them up. I watch Shio and Akari drool over Eiyu, and I think, “Him?” What's so great about him that he literally has two girls essentially giving him a double lapdance in the middle of their classroom? Teenagers who don't know what to do with their horniness do get up to the darnedest things, and I certainly saw wilder things in high school, but usually the guy was at least good-looking or funny. Eiyu is about as appealing as a sock full of nickels. Maybe the reason he can't fathom these girls being into him is because he's aware that he has zero attractive qualities.

Similarly, the visuals have some unusual ideas behind them, but the execution is lacking. Eiyu and his harem occupy a candy-colored world, where the street is cerulean blue and garden walls are salmon pink. It's kind of fun, but also has the light pollution aesthetic white gradient that makes me feel like I'm squinting through fog. The art was inconsistent as well, as Shio's considerable boobs grew and shrank from scene to scene.

...Maybe it's time for a Tenchi Muyo! rewatch.

Now this one is just bizarre. The opening narration of You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! consists of our protagonist Eiyu ranting about how the cheesy cliches about swooning childhood friends from anime and manga are all BS, and that he knows all too well what “the real world” is like. Except, in the very next scene, the show reveals that Eiyu's childhood friend Shio is a swooning goof who sneaks into his bed to cuddle him at night before flashing her ass at him to leap out of his bedroom window. This is, like, a regular part of their routine, you see, nevermind the obvious flirting and the constant shoving of her bouncing breasts to every unaccosted inch of his body. Akari is the exact same kind of living cartoon trope, except she embodies the red-headed tsundere that yours truly probably would have been crushing on if this show came out in 2012 (you can blame Asuka from Evangelion for permanently breaking my brain on that front).

In other words, the joke seems to be that Eiyu is so rock-stupid that he genuinely cannot comprehend that he is living the most stock-standard rom-com cliche imaginable, even though he complains about not living in a stock-standard rom-com cliche. Is that…is that really it? We're just doing all of the most obvious jokes imaginable, and the only twist is that we call attention to our laziness by regularly having our protagonist loudly screech, “There's just no freaking way my horny-ass freak best friends could be horny for me!” That's just…not very funny or interesting at all.

So, why does this show exist, again? It's 2026, after all. The fourth wall lies in ruined tatters, and what little of it that remains has been defaced by crude graffiti of Deadpool making lame wisecracks about superhero landings and how much better Logan is than any film he will ever be involved with. You might have been able to get away with being nothing more than “vaguely self-aware rom-com trash” back in, say, 2013, but you don't get a free pass for lazy writing anymore just by loudly announcing to everyone in your audience that you know that you're being lazy.

If I wanted to be generous, I could look at You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! as a spin on “teasing” heavy rom-coms like Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro or Teasing Master Takagi-san, since Eiyu's gal-pals clearly love screwing with the poor dummy. Unfortunately, those comparisons only make me more irritated with this show's lame jokes and thin characters. Teasing Master Takagi-san is, for my money, the single best romance anime of the last decade. You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! isn't even half as good as some of the better romantic comedies we've seen in the last few days. It's got pleasing artwork and an admittedly pretty color palette, so you could certainly do a lot worse, but I can't see anyone turning to this show as a first-draft pick this Winter. It just can't measure up to the competition.

I'm not going to lie, I like the concept at the core of this show. Despite the absurdity of the resulting situation, it is something incredibly true to life—but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Basically, Eiyu loves the rom-com genre of fiction. He reads it obsessively. His favorite trope is even the childhood friends-to-lovers trope. However, like any well-adjusted person, he can distinguish fiction from reality. He knows that his childhood friends are just that. Their closeness is one born of longtime proximity and not romantic intent. Thus, he goes out of his way not to catch feelings for them—to not let his fictional fetish ruin his dearly held interpersonal relationships. He's acting incredibly responsibly. There's just one problem: they are actually into him.

Moreover, he's not projecting cliché fictional situations into the real world; they are actually happening—and in Shio's case, it's completely on purpose. She has used their closeness to read his favorite manga and makes conscious efforts to win his heart by reenacting the scenes held within. Of course, the joke is, by playing into situations he's sure don't happen in real life, Eiyu becomes even more resolute that there is no romantic intent behind her actions.

This brings us to the true-to-life core of the show mentioned above. We, as humans, often overcorrect. When we see one path forward as leading toward a bad conclusion, we choose the furthest route possible from that so as not to even have a chance of having that bad thing happen. This, all too often, brings about some other bad situation that we overlook because we were so focused on the one we were trying to avoid.

In his efforts to avoid treating his childhood friends as romantic foils in a rom-com, Eiyu has inadvertently disregarded the simple fact that, sometimes, childhood friends do actually fall in love and start dating. He has gone from one extreme to another—now the only question is, will he be able to reach a happy medium and find romance with one (or both) of his childhood friends?

I really enjoy the friends-to-lovers trope in romance fiction, but this show left me utterly cold. It's a shame, really, because it has some decent setup to lampoon the subgenre: protagonist Eiyu (real name: Yonosuke) loves reading romantic comedies about childhood friends, but he's smart enough to know that that's not how things generally work in real life. Except that his two childhood friends Shio and Akari absolutely want to make it work, specifically with him. Shio in particular goes to great lengths to reenact genre tropes in hopes of getting through to her crush: she climbs through his bedroom window, she crawls into bed with him, and she does her level best to make sure that he gets some good feels of her breasts. She somehow even makes it so that her skirt is basically glued to her legs until a stray breeze comes by, although on second thought, maybe that's an issue with the animation. Still, it would be funnier if somehow it were Shio.

Akari, on the other hand, is doing her tsundere best to get to Eiyu before Shio does, although she's much less physically forward than Shio. Everything is designed to be a parody of the basic shounen romcom, and by right,s I should have found it funny. And yet, here we are. I think that part of the problem is that nearly every line is screamed – whether it's Eiyu doing his damnedest not to react to the girls sitting on his lap, Akari freaking out about seeing him and Shio together, or Shio faking a sprained ankle, everything is yelled at what feels like maximum volume or given a pseudo-sultry inflection that's grating. The latter does at least make some sense since neither of them knows how to be sultry; we're talking about girls who think that Eiyu's thighs are his weak spot while grinding on his lap. Yes, sweetie. It's his legs that are the issue here.

There are some visual issues at play, too, although none are quite to the level of the unfunny writing. The entire show looks washed out, with the already pastel shades appearing to have been left out in the sun too long. Hemlines fluctuate between scenes, as does Shio's breast size, and a lot of the walking animation looks very stiff. I do like the imagery in the ending theme, where the pale shades work to their advantage, though.

With two more girls yet to be introduced, this risks becoming more annoying. Because it does have the thread of parody running through, things could improve going forward, but I'm not in any humor to give it a second episode.