Two things are truer now in anime than they’ve ever been: The eternal need to riff on Harry Potter is still going strong, with shows like Witch Hat Atelier leading the charge and Mashle: Magic and Muscles making a delightful farce of She Who Shall Not Be Named’s wizarding world. The second thing is that queer supernatural series seem to be at the top of the syllabus for anime studios making up for lost time. I Want To Love You Till Your Dying Day is a yuriful dark fantasy anime set squarely at the equator of these two truths, borrowing a long-lost concept from the Kirby games for its plot: kissing your homies to heal them.
I knew I wanted to watch I Want To Love You Till Your Dying Day the moment Kadokawa blew me away with its concept trailer a year ago. Written by Nachi Aono and animated by studio Roll2, the series is set in a part boarding school, part orphanage where child soldiers are sent to the front lines to fight an unclear war that’s been going on for ages. Unlike her fellow classmates who are perfectly okay with how not okay their circumstances are, fourteen-year-old Sheena Totsuki is not built for this. She's what her classmates would call a “pussifest”—pacifist—under their breath whenever she walks the halls, given how weak she is at magic. And to make matters worse, her roommate was killed in action a day before she chastised Sheena for how easy she must have it for being weak.
Sheena’s lot in life is perpetually having bad days, but things take a turn for toxic positivity when Mimi Kagari, a bubbly girl covered in the blood of her enemies, mooches off of her for a late-night snack. We learn that Mimi is a big deal: She’s the school’s secret weapon in the war effort. But for Sheena’s purposes, Mimi is as enamored with rice balls and bread as she is with Sheena’s scent, and she is gonna be Sheena’s new roomie.
Beyond the apparent FUBAR nature of I Want To Love You Till Your Dying Day’s world, we learn very early on that there is tenderness to be found amidst the show’s wanton carnage. Roommates who form a close enough bond can heal each other with a lil smooch, just like Kirby and his friendos. Granted, their kisses are less pecks and more chalant than the pink demigod smooching his homies. When Sheena and Mimi witness classmates kissing on a stairwell the former is embarrassed by it, what with her never having her first kiss, and the latter, not thinking it a big deal, plants her one to heal a scar on her cheek. Mind you, this all happens at the end of the first episode and picks right up in its second episode, leading to Sheena’s ensuing sapphic panic.
When a mock battle goes awry, as they’re wont to do, and Sheena has her arm blown off by a mysterious man whom Mimi makes short work of, she plants a healing kiss on Sheena that—through the power of yuri—magically regrows Sheena’s arm despite it being lost on the battlefield. It’s a phenomenon I can’t stop laughing at throughout the day. Not because their healing act is ridiculous, but because it’s refreshingly tame compared to other indulgent, unabashedly horny fantasy shows I’ve subjected myself to that bend themselves over backward to jerryrig intimacy for the plot.
I’ve watched my fair share of indulgent anime where the writer’s thinly veiled fetish flashbangs your eyes in the most horny way imaginable under the translucent veil of plot. Key among them is Chained Soldier, an anime run on a teenage boy’s cosmic laws of equivalent exchange. Chained Soldier goes about its feedback loop of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure-tinged battles and fan service by having its hero subject himself on the battlefield as a slave to a harem of superpowered women.
Depending on how much effort a battle is, and how many women he assists, they’re in turn contracted to fulfill a subconscious fantasy of his as a reward. Naturally, the anime has uncensored episodes, and its ongoing manga has “special” half-chapters that get into the nitty-gritty of depicting these rewards that the otherwise mild-mannered hero lets viewers live vicariously through.
An eerily similar phenomenon occurs in ecchi staple Highschool DXD, only in it, its male hero must power up his tokusatsu fists via heavy petting with the show’s ready-and-willing and more-down-bad-for-him-than-he-is-for-them ensemble.
Then there’s Darling In The Franxx—Studio Trigger, A-1 Pictures, Trigger, and CloverWorks' mecha anime—whose contribution to the anime zeitgeist and this conversation begins and ends on reverse cowgirl cockpit.
If you can imagine it, somewhere way, way, way down the rung on the indulgent Richter scale is a supernatural harem anime called Tales of Wedding Rings where, you guessed it, a guy is the epicenter of a harem where the women around him compete to be his number one wife while the show subjects viewers to the mostly weirdly drawn nipples in anime.
All that to say, supernatural anime of this ilk run the gamut of failing to deliver a narrative while showcasing how and why they depict intimacy among their characters. By and large, anime offer romance fast‑fashion style, where their catalog promises elegance but what arrives feels flimsy, rushed, and poorly stitched together.
But unlike the aforementioned shows—of which Chained Soldier is still a fun watch despite it all—I Want To Love You Till Your Dying Day’s depiction of intimacy, while silly to read on the page, comes off less like intimacy for intimacy’s sake and more like horny, jingly keys. In tandem with its forever-war backdrop, feelings of inadequacy about one’s ability to enact violence, and the contradiction of its high school sorcerers going sicko mode and shooting off killing spells, there’s room to wonder how tenderness could even survive a world that doesn’t blink twice about violence, dispatching students by their serial numbers instead of their names to die on the front lines. Learning that said tenderness manifests in a kiss with the power to heal is downright revolutionary in how it doesn’t make me reflectively roll my eyes.
Kissing in I Want To Love You Till Your Dying Day isn’t an arbitrary power-up whose solution is “kiss more” to solve an equation in the most Dragon Ball Z powerscaling sense like the aforementioned shows. That’s why Mimi and Sheena’s first kiss was shocking, yes, but “unremarkable” to Sheena—a sentiment I can lob at other shows with a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ approach to depicting intimacy as plot contrivance rather than a plot essential element to the story they’re telling. But here, there’s a risk to kissing beyond the embarrassment of initiating intimacy. Should you lack the power or the bond to smooch and heal someone, you run the risk of getting hurt the same way they were, or worse. I laugh at the show’s portrayal of magic kisses as healing because their restorative powers and the risk they run should things go awry are pretty damn true to life.
A kiss can be an act of intimacy that can feel like it saved your life just as it can be an impulsive exercise in not reading the fucking room. I look forward to seeing how healing kisses prove themselves a boon against the horrors that no doubt await our heroines in the weeks to come.
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Isaiah Colbert
