Mona Kawai has always been the cutest girl around and the center of attention. Boys want her and girls want to be her. She stole the show as a baby in her bassinet at the maternity ward of the hospital, and kept that streak rolling through early childhood, kindergarten, elementary school, and junior high. But now in her second year of high school, the unthinkable has happened to this self-declared “Queen Bee”: a boy has failed to fall for her. The boy in question is the blunt, gruff, and introverted Medaka Kuroiwa, a recent transfer student to Mona’s Tokyo high school. But whatever his personality, he isn’t about to get away with defying the cosmic order of Mona’s universe by brushing her off, not if she has anything to do with it, and so she goes on a charm offensive. After a series of increasingly risqué tactics fail to crack his armor and get a reaction from this seeming paragon of stoicism, Mona finally goes for an all-out attack and manages to get Medaka alone with her in the nurse’s office. It’s there that her plans go completely sideways as an accidental tripping gets her way too close to Medaka for her own comfort, and while she’s freaking out Medaka coolly extricates them from the situation without taking any advantage of her. Mona is left in pouty denial that Medaka charmed her far more than she charmed him. The second half of the episode plays out to a fairly similar script as the first, but we do learn a crucial piece of information about Medaka: he’s a Buddhist monk-in-training who’s under a (vaguely defined) vow of abstinence. Also, for all Medaka’s stoic facade, Mona has been getting to him more than she knows. And so the battlefield is set, a self-declared seductress who’s too nervous to back that claim up when the chips are down vs a not-quite-so-ironclad stoic who’s far more open to a romantic relationship than he wants to admit…

Well, Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms didn’t start terribly, but it didn’t do a lot to impress either. The animation is passable but quite basic, exemplified by the final section of the opening credits where the five main girls do a simple and stiff dance routine that’s pretty weak for a segment where it’s traditional for a studio to throw their haymaker punch. And as for the significant number of fanservice shots in this episode, well, as a manga reader, I can confirm that things generally (and mercifully) lessen in that department over time as the character arcs develop. And speaking of the characters, I do actually like the main pair. Medaka is probably going to be catching a lot of flack this season for how dense he is and how he repeats “worldly desires begone!” like a broken record, but he’s shown to be a genuinely decent guy who walks away from steamy scenarios because he chooses to based on values and beliefs, not because he panics and “chokes”. As for Mona, if this wasn’t the most endearing start for her, we do at least see early clues of her later development: caught between her persona’s reckless ego and her true self’s shyness about intimacy and physical contact. Her pride writes checks that her better judgment refuses to cash, and it’s an entertaining schtick… once you get to know her. And that’s what I see this series’ biggest hurdle: keeping viewer interest through the early chapters of The Preacher’s Boy Doesn’t Have Time For This Crap Medaka, etc to reach the point where the story starts to hit its stride.

Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms is available for streaming on Crunchyroll.