Anime Profile: Romantic Killer

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Romantic Killer is a 12-episode Netflix original anime released in 2022, animated by Studio Domerica and directed by Kazuya Ichikawa, based on Wataru Momose's four-volume shōjo manga of the same name. It opens with Anzu Hoshino, an ordinary high-school girl whose three great loves in life are video games, chocolate, and her cat Momohiki. She has zero interest in romance, no patience for boys, and an unshakeable conviction that her current arrangement is paradise.

That paradise is rudely interrupted by Riri, a small pink magical creature dispatched by some higher power that has decided Japan's declining birth rate must be addressed one solitary gamer at a time. Riri appears in Anzu's living room and announces that her games, her chocolate, and even her cat are being confiscated for thirty days, during which time she will be coerced into shōjo-romance scenarios with a parade of attractive boys until she falls in love with one of them. The catch, as Anzu quickly realizes, is that nothing in Riri's rulebook actually forces her to take the bait. She just has to survive a month of increasingly absurd setups with the gentle, golden-retriever-energy Junta Hayami, the cool aloof model Tsukasa Kazuki, and the wealthy, scheming Hijiri Koganei.

The result is a sharp, fast-paced romantic comedy that gleefully pokes fun at the conventions of the shōjo genre while still earning genuine emotional beats along the way. Anzu's flat refusal to perform as the genre expects of her, paired with her deepening, against-her-better-judgment friendship with Junta, makes Romantic Killer one of the most quietly subversive entries in the streaming-anime romance boom of the early 2020s.