Mysterious Girlfriend X

Mysterious Girlfriend X

Mysterious Girlfriend X anime series cover art
Mysterious Girlfriend X

Overview

Mysterious Girlfriend X (Nazo no Kanojo X / 謎の彼女X) is the most uncomfortable anime I’ve ever seen. Yes, I’ve seen things like Oreimo, Eromanga Sensei, One Room, and even Shoujo Ramune, and somehow Mysterious Girlfriend X was the worst.

At face value, it seems like it’s going to be a romance anime set in a school with a weird heroine, and indeed it is. However, it’s not wholesome as some (HeavyROMAN) would have me believe. The first hint that something is amiss is that the series is rated R – 17+ for violence and profanity.

Now, I don’t know exactly where the profanity comes in because I don’t remember any of that, but there was certainly violence. And I don’t mean normal anime violence, I mean there was stalking and sexual assault committed by our protagonist, Akira Tsubaki.

There’s definitely something wrong with Tsubaki on a psychological level, but all the extremely creepy or even illegal things he does are chalked up as him being in love.

The last time I checked keeping strands of a girl’s hair in a capsule so you can sniff them isn’t normal. And repeatedly trying to grab a girl against her will and then pinning her to the floor so she can’t get away also screams assault to me, not love.

I think that’s really what made me the most uncomfortable about this series. It takes behaviors that are clearly signs that someone is dangerous or disturbed and brushes them off as something that everyone does. If you relate to Tsubaki, that’s probably not a good sign.

The other thing about this series that made me uncomfortable was actually the entire premise of the show, which is that people are connected by drool. I don’t have an issue with that as a concept, but as a practice, it’s pretty disgusting.

Maybe this is just me splitting hairs, but I have no issue with kissing. I do, however, have an issue with drinking someone else’s saliva or sucking it off their fingers after they slobber all over them. This seems like a very specific fetish, and it’s just not for me. Do something normal like BDSM.

Characters

Akira Tsubaki, as I’ve already said, has some real psychological issues. He’s into drinking girls’ drool and physically assaulting them, but never seems to even consider kissing his girlfriend. It’s almost like that would be too normal or something.

He also willingly, and proudly, admits to extremely creepy acts such as the aforementioned thing about sniffing hair he keeps in capsules. Oh, and he’s very possessive of his girlfriend, to the point that he wants her to look unattractive so that other boys don’t look at her.

Akira Tsubaki and Mikoto Urabe from the anime series Mysterious Girlfriend X
Akira Tsubaki and Mikoto Urabe

Mikoto Urabe is Tsubaki’s mysterious girlfriend. She’s a weird girl who doesn’t want friends and only seems to hang out with Tsubaki long enough to give him some of her drool every day. Why does she do this? Because he’ll go into drool relapse if she doesn’t, of course.

Urabe’s drool also has special properties which physically connect her and anyone she has a “special” bond with. For example, if she cuts her hand and then has Tsubaki taste her drool, he will develop the same cut on his hand. I wonder how many people had to taste Urabe’s drool before she figured out she had these powers.

Also, Urabe carries a pair of scissors in her panties strapped to her thigh.

While there are more characters, the only other one I have anything important to say about is Ayuko Oka. Oka is dating Tsubaki’s best friend, Kouhei Ueno, and also becomes Urabe’s one and only friend (besides Tsubaki I guess). And like Tsubaki, she too shares a “special” bond with Urabe via drool.

The manga of this series does continue after where the anime ends, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Urabe and Oka get into a more romantic relationship later on. But for now, the extent of their relationship is Oka feeding Urabe lunch and occasionally stealing a taste of her drool because that’s just what friends do.

Conclusion

Overall I gave Mysterious Girlfriend X a 4/10, which admittedly is lower than I expected going in. However, I do think my rating of it is justified for a number of reasons on top of the fact that I found it to be a very uncomfortable anime to watch.

Also, I’d like to point out that I’m not saying that things which are meant to make you feel uncomfortable are bad. I have a whole blog post dedicated to discussing my thoughts on mature themes in anime such as sexual assault if you’re interested in reading more about that.

But the TL;DR is that it’s not what themes are present in an anime, it’s how they are presented. Goblin Slayer has much more graphic representations of sexual assault, but it’s a series about the horrors of sexual assault. By contrast, Mysterious Girlfriend X is almost normalizing it.

Regardless of the series’ stance on topics such as this, I still don’t think it was all that good. The plot was pretty lackluster and it essentially amounted to a slice of life series about some kids with a drool fetish. Maybe the series gets better after the anime ended, but it’s not something I would go out of my way to follow up on.

There’s also some ecchi present in the series, but you may notice that the anime isn’t actually tagged as an ecchi. The manga is, however, so I guess there are more ecchi scenes present in that, which makes sense considering creators can get away with more of that in manga than anime.

With that said, this series commits one of the grave sins of ecchi. There’s a scene in which both Urabe and Tsubaki’s middle school crush are naked and rather than doing some dynamic censoring with objects or their hands, most of their bodies are just cast in random shadow.

I don’t care about a series being censored, but at least censor it in a creative way that doesn’t simply use random shadows or beams of light.

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And, finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month even if he was the one to recommend this anime to me. To learn more about becoming a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

2 Replies to “Mysterious Girlfriend X”

  1. she is a creepy abusive violent psycho too
    first episode was strange and intrusive but intriguing, but in the second she already is so bad you should just turn away and run until you can’t run no more in the hopes that you get out of her reach

    1. Any girl who has a bodily fluid fetish isn’t for me. I think that’s the real red flag in this show.

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