First Impression: Whisper Me a Love Song

First-year student Himari Kino is bursting with energy, excited about what life in high school will bring. Luckily for her, it doesn’t take more than a few hours to identify a new passion. At the new student welcome ceremony, Himari “falls in love at first sight” with Yori Asanagi, the stand-in singer for a light music club band that performs at the event. Yori is beautiful, cool, and talented, but as her story unfolds, we discover that she’s unsure about joining the band, and while she’s a songwriter, the older girl is unable to write love songs because, according to her, she’s never fallen in love. But could a meeting at the lockers after school with the assertive Himari change all that, and really, change everything for the girls?

Adapted from the manga, this new GL title jumps immediately into the relationship at the center of the story. Sort of. At least a confession comes right away, which surprised me because the rest of the show’s opening half felt very in line with what I would expect from a soft, romantic yuri title like this: beautiful use of color (including in some watercolor-style animation); moments in which it’s obvious by the music and close-ups, full of flare, that the girls are falling in love; and the combination of the younger, excitable girl and her cool, talented senpai. Admittedly, there are signs that the show may try something a little different when the younger girl is shown to actually be more confident than the older, which, by the way, adds an interesting layer to the characters and their relationship. Less welcome is the unusual way in which the second half of the episode progresses. Just as I wondered if Whisper Me a Love Song would dive into the particulars of how this relationship will work, it instead goes for a more shounen-style approach through a misunderstanding between Yori and Himari about their feelings toward one another. I wonder if this decision was made because it “pulls back” the full-throttle yuri that the series was pushing forward to that point, making it more acceptable to an audience that wants something that’s still a little on the shoujo-ai side, or if it’s an attempt at doing something that we’ll find more engaging than typical fare. Unfortunately, I don’t think the latter is being achieved, and it makes me worry that the series will be more surface-level than what I’m looking for because, honestly, I can find cute series that are in my more preferred romances focusing on boy-girl couplings; the emotions and depth that’s perhaps more likely to be expressed in a GL series is what I’d like to see, and if that’s lacking, I might check out of this one.

Whisper Me a Love Song can be streamed on HiDIVE. For a nuanced look at how we see GL series and why we review them, check out this article.

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4 thoughts on “First Impression: Whisper Me a Love Song”

      1. haha🤣that’s gonna set the bar too high. I’m just gonna expect this like Given but yuri (or maybe K-On without girls love?)

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