Summary
- Domestic Girlfriend is a steamy anime series with a unique and explicit premise involving the main character living with attractive sisters-in-law, leading to complicated relationships and emotional turmoil.
- The series explores forbidden love and the moral dilemmas that arise from the characters' desires, with tense moments and last-minute interruptions preventing the situations from getting too out of control.
- Despite its mature themes, Domestic Girlfriend also delves into heartbreak and the characters questioning what is morally right, creating a dramatic and captivating story that shares similarities with other explicit or controversial anime.
Anyone who is familiar with overly explicit anime might find more than a few similarities between them and the premise in Crunchyroll's Domestic Girlfriend series. In fact, the series' earlier episodes will likely have many first-time viewers questioning what exactly an anime like this is doing on the streaming platform.
There are far too many X-rated anime story lines where the male protagonist lives in the same house as his very attractive sister-in-law, and everyone's actions end up being clearly more driven by their carnal desires than what the societal and familial consequences could be if they fail to control themselves.
This is, in a nutshell, the main premise of Domestic Girlfriend by Kei Sasuga, except Sasuga ups the ante considerably. Male protagonist Natsuo Fujii incidentally has previous ties with his new sisters-in-law that complicate their unique situation once they become one, big, happy family.
Domestic Girlfriend Does Get Quite Steamy
Created by Kei Sasuga, and produced by studio Diomedéa
One of Natsuo's sister-in-law is his long-time crush and teacher Hina Tachibana, who Natsuo, of course, had already begun writing a romance novel about long before the events of the anime. Meanwhile, Natsuo had recently had an intimate relationship with Hina's younger sibling, Rui, when she had randomly come onto him after just having met him at a casual gathering. Then, the three siblings soon find themselves in emotionally fueled scenarios that force them to question whether forbidden love is worth pursuing once they start living under the same roof. Of course, Domestic Girlfriend isn't actually as raunchy as it seems, so there are many highly tense moments, especially early on, which could have easily gotten out of control if the quintessential "last-minute interruption" didn't happen at the right time.
Earlier episodes also introduce an intriguing buffer that keeps Natsuo pious while allowing him and Rui to bond in a Platonic way when they take it upon themselves to break up Hina's affair with a married man. Even though Natsuo's intentions are obviously not completely pure, there is a sense of justice throughout their effort that supersedes his blatant ulterior motives. However, once this buffer is removed from the equation, Domestic Girlfriend does cross a few lines, but it doesn't let things get too far – as a mature anime would. Domestic Girlfriend normally accomplishes this through well-executed nuances besides just "last-minute interruptions". For example, a heated exchange between Natsuo and Hina over her affair quickly escalates into a ionate moment, but it abruptly ends when Hina tries to hurt Natsuo emotionally in a desperate attempt to salvage that affair.
That said, Domestic Girlfriend isn't all fun and games. There is genuine heartbreak, and the characters do grapple with what's morally right more than once as they try to ignore what their heart is telling them. In fact, all three of them physically have to remove themselves from this emotionally toxic environment on separate occasions whenever the whole situation gets to be too much for them. Regardless, while a well-written – albeit steamy – drama, Domestic Girlfriend's overall premise and the many scenarios therein share so much in common with explicit or Rent-A-Girlfriend, also on Crunchyroll, since the latter obviously doesn't comically directly draw from X-rated material as blatantly as Domestic Girlfriend.
