Girlfriend, Girlfriend

カノジョも彼女 (Kanojo mo Kanojo)

9.0(1)

OtakuDen

6.5(209,692)

MAL Score

Ranked #7923

Popularity #635

Comedy
Romance
Harem
School

Episodes: 12
Duration: 24 min per ep
Aired: Jul 3, 2021 to Sep 18, 2021
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Naoya Mukai can hardly believe his luck when his childhood friend, Saki Saki, finally accepts after all his persistent confessions. Determined to be the perfect boyfriend, he throws himself into their new relationship with wholehearted devotion.

That peace doesn’t last long: Nagisa Minase, after months of working up the courage, confesses her feelings to Naoya. Though he turns her down at first, Nagisa’s sincerity and persistence keep pulling at him—until Naoya suggests an outrageous solution: dating both Saki and Nagisa at the same time, with neither kept in the dark. The result is a steady stream of awkward negotiations and comedic chaos as the trio tries to make their unconventional arrangement work.

Otaku Consensus

Girlfriend, Girlfriend works when treated as an intentionally abrasive harem farce: Satoshi Kuwabara’s brisk direction and Keiichirou Oochi’s gag-first structure turn romantic indecision into loud, rapid-fire negotiation comedy. Critics and fans split sharply because the show’s commitment to polyamorous parody, slapstick, and escalating bad judgment is also its biggest weakness: anyone looking for emotional depth or believable romance will find the writing proudly shallow. Its reputation is best captured by the fan refrain that it is “trash” they still came back to watch every week.

Why You Should Watch

If you want a harem comedy that skips the “who will he choose?” holding pattern and runs straight into bad-idea logistics, Girlfriend, Girlfriend is built for you. It scratches the same rom-com itch as The Quintessential Quintuplets or Rent-A-Girlfriend, but replaces emotional mystery and rental-drama angst with open declarations, circular arguments, and slapstick consequences. The appeal is the velocity: Satoshi Kuwabara’s 12-episode adaptation treats every conversation like a timed explosive, while Keiichirou Oochi’s series composition keeps the show locked on negotiations, jealousy math, and escalating embarrassment. Viewers who need believable romance will bounce off it hard; viewers who enjoy “this is trash, see you next week” comedy will understand why its modest scores coexist with huge popularity.

Key Characters

N
Naoya Mukai(VA: Junya Enoki)
Naoya is memorable less as a suave harem lead than as a catastrophically honest protagonist whose sincerity turns every romantic problem into a public policy debate.
S
Saki Saki(VA: Ayane Sakura)
Saki brings the series its tsundere snap, functioning as both romantic participant and the loudest audience surrogate for how absurd the situation has become.
N
Nagisa Minase(VA: Azumi Waki)
Nagisa’s appeal comes from the contrast between her gentle delivery and the show’s manic comic environment, making her the calm center that keeps the farce from becoming pure noise.
R
Rika Hoshizaki(VA: Ayana Taketatsu)
Rika is the cast’s chaos escalator, the kind of main character who pushes the anime further into its shameless female-harem and parody identity.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
AniList’s tag profile is unusually explicit: Polyamorous at 98%, Female Harem at 97%, Love Triangle at 94%, and Slapstick at 89%. That combination signals a show catalogued less as a standard endgame romance and more as a transparent multi-partner comedy engine.
2
Tezuka Productions’ first season ran for exactly 12 episodes from July 3 to September 18, 2021, giving the adaptation a compact Summer 2021 weekly-gag rhythm rather than the sprawl of a long romantic drama.
3
The credited creative spine is built for farce: Hiroyuki created the source material, Satoshi Kuwabara directed, and Keiichirou Oochi handled series composition. The anime’s structure repeatedly favors fast verbal escalation and slapstick resets over quiet romantic interiority.
4
The voice cast is a major part of the show’s comic texture, pairing Junya Enoki’s earnest male lead performance with Ayane Sakura, Azumi Waki, Ayana Taketatsu, and Rie Takahashi across the primarily female main cast.
5
Its reception footprint is more interesting than its score alone: a 6.51 MAL average and 63/100 AniList score sit beside MAL Popularity #633, 208,618 MAL votes, and 2,117 AniList favorites, making it a clear case of divisive but heavily sampled seasonal comedy.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: One review summed up the show with the label “Entertaining Egregious,” which fits its wider reputation: viewers often criticized the story logic while still returning weekly for the spectacle.
Fun fact 2: The production credits list Akiko Toyoda as character designer and an unusually broad prop-design team: Yuriko Takase, Nobuko Shinohara, Natsumi Yamada, Nobumasa Gotou, Riharu Murashima, and Fumiko Murashima.
Fun fact 3: The anime is tagged not only as Harem and School, but also as Parody at 84% and Satire at 74% on AniList, which helps explain why many fans read it as a send-up of harem conventions rather than a sincere romance.
Fun fact 4: Despite a MAL rank of #7892, Girlfriend, Girlfriend reached MAL Popularity #633, showing that its loud premise and meme-friendly reception pulled in far more viewers than its critical standing would suggest.
Fun fact 5: All five listed main characters have high-profile Japanese voice actors attached: Ayana Taketatsu as Rika Hoshizaki, Rie Takahashi as Shino Kiryuu, Azumi Waki as Nagisa Minase, Junya Enoki as Naoya Mukai, and Ayane Sakura as Saki Saki.