Marmalade Boy
[Episodes 1-24 of 76 Reviewed]
[Reviewed by Bethany]

I hate this show. I truly hate this show. And yet I cannot stop watching it. I swear I can feel the life being sucked out of me as I watch episode after episode; I dislike most of the characters; it's more melodramatic than even I can handle. And yet I persist in watching. I've been outrageously spoiled on the episodes I haven't seen; I don't like how certain things turn out ... and yet I plan to some day see the rest of it. Why? This is because Marmalade Boy is the anime equivalent of heroin. I swear they must be using subliminal messaging somehow. Or perhaps the creators just tapped into the same addiction well soap operas do. Because who needs quality when you have an audience that will watch no matter what?

Story
Miki Koishikawa's life is about to be turned upside down. While her worries up until now have had to do with high school life and the quiet musings of romance, everything in her world is about to go topsy-turvy. How? Her parents have just returned from a vacation in Hawaii. And informed her—smiling brightly as they do so—they're going to be getting a divorce. Not just that: they met a couple while on vacation and are going to switch spouses. The two couples are going to live together in one house—along with their children ... Miki, and the son of the other couple, a boy named Yuu who happens to be Miki's age. Before Miki can make sense of things, everything about her has changed, and she must learn to adjust to her bizarre family life ... while dealing with the fact that the introduction of Yuu into her life has brought her more than she can handle in the romance department, as love triangles become love pentagons and the story becomes a tangled mess of affection, uncertainty, jealousy, and just about every other emotion you can fit into a jar of marmalade.

...Really
Well, I'm being unfairly harsh on Marmalade Boy. It does have its good points — one of them being Satoshi Miwa, despite his bright blue mullet and cat eyes. Miwa brings a bit of wit and spark into the series, but still manages to be one of the few characters who ends up without what he wants in the end. ...But I suppose I should back-track to the main characters.

Miki is everything I can't stand about anime heroines. She is a gross misrepresentation of the typical high school teenager — shallow and thoughtless, quick to jump to ridiculous conclusions, naive in a way that does not point toward innocence but rather toward a lack of intelligence. She has little character and seems to care for nothing other than deciding which boy she truly likes: and yet she is adored by the majority of the cast. I can empathize with her plight but not with her actions. Her best friend, Meiko, is better by far — worlds away in intelligence and maturity, but is at points portrayed in a way that makes me angry at the injustice done to her characterization. Arimi comes off as smart but a bitch; Ginta is Miki with testicles. Fortunately, Yuu and Miwa make up for the majority of the cast by being both intelligent and interesting... but I have trouble completely liking Yuu because of his adoration for Miki. And I just want Na-chan to go away. Really away, where Meiko can't find him.

The idea is original, at least, and I've heard the manga is infinitely better than the anime (as they stretched an eight volume manga to make seventy-six episodes, and so had to pump the story full of nonsensical fluff, and more often than not lapse into absurdity). The music is also one of its redeeming qualities — despite the overuse of Moment in nearly every episode. The music is sort of cutesy, but fun, and Meiko's songs are correctly mournful. A lot of the character interactions are amusing, and it's a fairly solid show as far as shoujo romances go.

The Bottom Line
Marmalade Boy is so bad it's good. It's a soap opera that regurgitates the same material so often it begins to smell. But it's also entertaining in its own quirky way, and likable if only for its disregard of taste. (And here I go being needlessly harsh again...) Unless you can truly appreciate the melodrama for being melodrama and don't mind characters lacking all pretense to sense, stay away. But everyone needs anime like this every once in a while — something you can watch and guiltily enjoy without really having to think. Of course, there should really be a Surgeon General's Warning attached to it... right about where Miki's face is.