I previously wrote about how I will watch the upcoming third season of the Rent-a-Girlfriend anime, either on account of inertia or self-loathing. It is a sort of watchable bad series. Now I noted there was some small hope at the end of season two (note I am not familiar with the underlying source material) that the third season could at least be better than the second. This new report from Crunchyroll, however, is not cause for optimism:
The roster of four girls in the Rent-a-Girlfriend TV anime expands to five in the next season of the series that adapts the manga of the same name by Reiji Miyajima. Revealed today in a new teaser trailer for the upcoming season is Mini Yaemori, the neighbor (and a cosplayer!) of Kazuya and Chizuru who learns their secret very early on.
The protagonist is in love with his next-door neighbor and rental girlfriend, Mizuhara, who is clearly developing some feelings for him that she does not want. There are already three other girls. Kazuya’s malevolent ex-girlfriend, a former rental girlfriend who is obsessed with Kazuya for no good reason (and very annoying and creepy about it), and a third rental girlfriend who is too nice to be in this show. If you asked me “what does this show need to redeem itself in a third season,” I am confident that I would not have answered “another attractive girl to be inexplicably interested in the protagonist who is often too irritating to be described as an insert-character.”
(Note: I had scheduled this post to go live on March 6, 2023. For whatever reason, the scheduling failed. I only just now noticed. Because it was not time-sensitive, I decided to err on the side of better late than never.)