“Tomo-chan is a Girl” (January 2023, Lay-duce) is an anime where all the female lead wants is for the male lead to recognize her as a woman.

The two main characters of this show are Tomo Aizawa (voiced by Rie Takahashi) and Junichirou Kubota (Kaito Ishikawa) who grew up together with Junichirou thinking that Tomo was a boy due to her rambunctious nature. Now in high school, all Tomo wants is for Junichirou to see her as a girl and go out with her.

The story is surprisingly wholesome, with a great deal of growth between the two, with Jun, Junichiro, finally finding a comfortable ground with Tomo, and Tomo growing more ladylike with the help of Carol (Sally Amaki) and Misuzu (Rina Hidaka).

Character designs and how they utilize them are essential to anime as a genre, look at Carol for example, she’s a round mess of everything sweet and girly which is a major contrast to Misuzu and Tomo. Misuzu is very cunning and straightforward to a fault and Tomo is an athlete and kind of oblivious to Jun’s actions until told about it.

The art is as a viewer of rom-com anime expects, comedic, however, it also throws in the wrench of action whenever it calls for it, like with Tomo and Jun fighting. The comedy is the main focus of the art and the action scenes make the comedy more pronounced and gives good breathing room.

The way this show uses two athletic characters as love interests is quite unique and has a much different tone than most other romantic comedies. Jun being the stereotypical delinquent type and Tomo being a tomboy works rather well instead of the usual, for lack of better words, not knowing what love is “bunnies”.

There’s plenty more to this show of high quality that a viewer must see for themselves, however, there also happens to be a few issues that must be addressed.

It’s bland, there could be a lot more depth to the story and slow burning but the growth of interests between the two main characters is too quick. Along with the fact that there are only two love interests, instead of many “couples” with their own scenes together, its like all the characters in the show are struggling to put just these two together.

Another problem is that it’s a teen love story, they’re good and all however it feels like the rom-com genre in anime is just oversaturated with teenage love. Not all viewers of anime are teenagers and there should be more variety than just high school love.

Besides those gripes, the anime is enjoyable for viewers who like rom-coms and even those who don’t. However, if an audience feels like they’ve just been watching carbon copies of anime then this might have to be a skip for them.