Setting aside (though only for a moment) its intrinsic quality as a series, Honey Lemon Soda says something about the state of shoujo anime. It’s a veritable titan – 12 million in volume sales (that’s a lot). But that’s over 26 volumes and close to a decade, and if it were a shounen with its sales it would certainly have gotten an anime long before now. And not from JC Staff either (though we do have S2-3 of One Punch Man as counter-evidence). Unless a shoujo is really huge these days it tends to wind up with a live-action if anything at all (and indeed Honey Lemon Soda has had a movie).
But the point is the show itself, so let’s talk about that. I think it provides a good lesson: don’t get your hopes up too much when JC Staff is involved. The previews looked good, but that’s relatively easy (and – critically – cheap) to fake. On the whole this looks pretty low-rent production wise, with extremely stiff and jerky animation and minimal background detail. But it’s not terrible on the level of something like Bara no Souretsu or pure CGI like Shinigami Bocchan. And for a romance, it’s kind of okay. For an action series like OPM not so much, but we can worry about that later.
On balance my track record with pure shoujo romances hasn’t been great. HLS avoids some of the worst tropes of the subgenre, but the first episode does play as pretty boilerplate. We have an extremely timid and self-loathing first year high school girl, Ishimori Uka (Ichinose Kana) as the protagonist. Her name unfortunately lends itself to the unflattering nickname of “Ishi” (“Stony”) from her asswipe junior high tormentors. Her habit of staring off into space and not responding when spoken to (or more commonly at) doesn’t help the cause there either.
The male lead is Miura Kai (Yano Shougo). He went to a different middle school than Uka but had an interaction with her after a trio of bullies knocked her down and insulted her on the street. He didn’t do much, really – just handed her the school brochures she’d dropped and said a kind word or two (including the fact that he was going to attend Hachimitsu [Honey] High School) but it was enough to make a huge impression on a girl starved for any human interaction outside with her overprotective parents. So much so that she seemingly tanked her entrance exam to a prestigious high school so she could get into Hachimitsu, a safety school.
Kai is blonde (his hair reminds Uka of lemon soda, she says) and plays the role of bad boy but actually isn’t. He’s kind of brusque in the manner of shoujo love interests but that’s about it. After he accidentally douses Uka with (naturally) lemon soda their paths seem to start crossing more often, and eventually she almost manages to convince herself to talk to him. But the the trio of bullies show up, the tormenting starts again, and things take a turn for the worse. Kai being rather gallant finally steps in – but only after he cajoles Uka into asking for his (and that of his circle) help.
In truth Kai didn’t intervene much when he saw Ishimori being bullied earlier, but I’m kind of OK with that as he was trying to coax her into standing up for herself. And I did like the fact that in the end she wasn’t required to confront the bullies herself – which honestly would have been too big an ask – but merely to ask for help. That’s actually a really big first step and not to be underestimated. Apart from that this was, indeed, pretty by the book for a shoujo romance. But then that’s kind of the series’ reputation – genre formula executed very well. And I can certainly see that being a realistic possibility after the first episode.
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