Love Flops was an anime announced today at AnimeJapan 2022, leaning in hard on the harem tropes of early-2000s anime.
One interesting thing to note about Love Flops is that, while the voice acting cast has been announced, no mention of the staff or the studio behind the project has been made public as of yet. Additionally, the trailer is cut a little too perfect, suggesting some mild sci-fi themes through the prophecy of a robot made public that has the main character’s head all fuzzy.
You can watch the subtitled trailer at the link below:
What is Love Flops about?
The premise of Love Flops can be found below:
Asahi is an ordinary high school student who was hit by a series of disasters on his way to school, where he encountered five girls in the worst situation that happened one after the other similar to a strange event that occurs in manga and anime. After arriving at school exhausted, both physically and mentally, he runs into those five girls again, “aah… I really want to hide my face, but I couldn’t hide it”. On his way to change his shoes, he opened his shoebox to go home after school, there was a love letter inside. A love letter from an anonymous sender stated that they will be waiting behind the school building under the cherry blossom tree. “What exactly is this cliche situation?”, I guess I’ll check it out. The lighthearted and painful youth love story that blows through 5 directions is about to begin in the season when the cherry blossoms dance in the air.
Note how the description casually leaves out details regarding the sci-fi elements mentioned in the trailer and keeps the staff hidden…
Why hasn’t the studio and staff been made public yet?
The setting suggested by the trailer seems to involve some degree of prophecy given by a robot, implying that the series may veer into sci-fi territory. This isn’t an uncommon practice — the names of writers have been hidden in the past to protect the reputation of the work. One especially notable example of this is in the case of Gen Urobuchi, lovingly referred to as the Urobutcher, when he was announced as the writer of Madoka later on into its production due to his reputation as a gritty, realistic writer that isn’t afraid to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
Seeing as how the animation on the show is polished, we can safely assume that this isn’t a case of a mid-season studio swap or a change in staff. It seems as if the crew behind Love Flops may be trying to lean into the tropes behind the rom-com genre hard in the vein of Muv-Luv, another sci-fi series that has the same sort of predicted switcheroo behind its polished, trope-y exterior.
Another thing suggesting this switcheroo is the poster, which features characters not yet seen in the show, the slow, piano ballad outro, the tech theme of the website and logo for the show, and the rather short biographies of all the characters featured in the show when it comes to depth.
Love Flops is most certainly a show to keep an eye on because of its suspicious nature.