One of the top ecchi anime of the current season has been Renai Flops, aka Love Flops. It’s a bizarrely high-budget original series about a boy living in a futuristic world who acquires a harem of five cute girls. While the show has been a fun escape from the stresses of the real world, it’s recently been going in a surprisingly dark and exciting direction, exploring the role of A.I. technology in our future lives. Read my thoughts in this blog post! Warning: this post contains spoilers!
Renai Flops Finally Had Its Plot Twist
Renai Flops is a seemingly generic harem about Asahi, a boy living in a futuristic version of Tokyo, who acquires a harem of five girls: pure-hearted Aoi, sexy model Karin, cute tsundere Amelia, tomboyish Ilya and Hong Kong action hero Mongfa-sensei. The ridiculously sexy situations Asahi finds himself in are all somehow “too” convenient, and fans suspected there must be some kind of dark plot twist coming. Is Asahi in a coma, experiencing some sort of pre-death otaku fantasy? Is he trapped inside a dating-sim game? TELL US!
Well, we finally learned the truth: he’s actually inside a simulation created to help the one sentient A.I. in existence, who runs pretty much all of the world’s automated systems, experience love. This A.I. was based on the deceased daughter of a famous researcher. The girl happened to be a childhood friend of Asahi, and her name is — wait for it! — Ai. The five girls in Asahi’s harem are artificial creations based on the core A.I. so she could realize love with Asahi.
And thus it’s revealed that the “flops” in the title refers to the measure of how many floating point operations a processor can perform for each clock cycle. Tricksy anime studio!
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Sometimes an anime has perfect timing with its release. That’s definitely been the case with Renai Flops, which had the good luck of dropping just as the public discussion on how A.I. will affect us all started, thanks to the release of ChatGPT. This is the new “answer engine” from OpenAI that lets you say things like, “Describe the plot of Jojo to me in Ernest Hemingway’s writing style,” if you want that for some reason.
So when will we get A.I. simulations of digital waifus inside our phones who feel, or seem to feel, actual love for us? When will Siri start obsessing about us, as in the outstanding film Her? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d told me I’d be driving around Tokyo with my phone giving me accurate directions while transcribing emails with my voice two decades ago.
Why Renai Flops is a Great Ecchi Anime
One of the great things about talking about anime with everyone on J-List’s Twitter feed is opening myself up to feedback from thousands of fans. Often I’ll post a sexy screencap or GIF and mention the anime source, and someone will reply, “That’s not an anime. It’s a hentai!” Some fans even separate anime, hentai and ecchi into three categories as if they were totally unrelated. In my own inner English dialect, “anime” is the term for all animation created in Japan or Asia based on fictional works from Japan, which have many sub-genres, including sports, mecha, harem, ecchi, and hentai.
I personally prefer a good ecchi anime to full-on hentai for several reasons. Since it’s made to be broadcast on (late-night) TV, the quality of sexy-but-not-hardcore anime is much higher. I also love how the creators are challenged to invent clever situations for the characters to find themselves in that don’t involve open sex. Sometimes the result is glorious, such as the Kiss x Sis anime, and other times it’s merely a lot of fun.
(Elon broke Twitter links, video is here!)
There have been some amazing ecchi anime moments in Love Flops. For example, Ilya is pretending to be a boy, and this is required to take a bath with Asahi. To hide her secret, she puts a Tengu mask under her towel to simulate a giant penis, “because I’m a boy.”
Then there’s the episode where Karin makes a contract with a Kyubey-esque alien named SOD and becomes a magical girl. To defend the Earth against creatures from the Contraceptimension, Asahi and Karin must get into the Magic Mirror go-anywhere JAV set, and have sex. The shout-outs to Madoka Magica and Soft on Demand had me laughing so hard I almost woke up Mrs. J-List.
Thanks for reading this blog post about the potential future of simulated A.I. waifus, and the Renai Flops anime. Are you enjoying the show? Post your comments below, or reply to us on Twitter!
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