You win, Rent-A-Girlfriend. I Give Up

In all my 28 years on this spinning rock, I’ve read my fair share of manga—some absolute classics, some guilty pleasures, and plenty that were straight up trash. But no series has tested my patience quite like Rent-A-Girlfriend. Somehow, against all odds, it’s become the most bizarrely pivotal manga out right now—perched at the edge of being either a brilliant subversion of the genre or a drawn-out cliche that’ll embolden red-pilled manosphere incels for generations. And honestly? I’m too drained to care anymore. 

Rent-A-Girlfriend, by Reiji Miyajima, is a rom-com series I can best describe as Scott Pilgrim, but worse. It follows Kazuya Kinoshita, a perpetually down-bad college student who, off the heels of a brutal breakup, impulsively hires a rental girlfriend named Chizuru Mizuhara to fill the hole in his sadboy heart. I genuinely can’t stress this enough: Kazuya is a weirdo to the nth degree at the start of the series. He blows through tissues and can’t be bothered to clean them up. Early Kazuya lashes out at Chizuru for “faking it” on their rental date, despite her doing her job. He embodies every red flag rolled into one desperate, entitled fuckboy. And this is before the trashy harem manga/anime hijinks ensue.

Kazuya and Chizuru’s grandmothers, conveniently bosom buddies at the same nursing home, spot them together, roping them into continuing a charade of “fake dating” after getting spotted together and keeping up appearances in front of Kazuya’s friends, which inevitably spirals out of control. Things get even messier when the series leans hard into full-blown harem chaos. Enter: a girl whose heart condition means her kokoro only goes doki doki for Kazuya; another painfully shy rental girlfriend but still Team Kazuya because he shows normal human decency to her; a loli sidekick who exists purely to cheer on the will-they-won’t-they with her finger firmly tipping the scale toward the former; and an ex who, ironically is the only one calling out the madness—yet gets vilified by readers who just see her as a bitch. 

By now, you’re probably wondering why I even bothered diving into this series. Trust me, I ask myself that same thing every week when I clock in to read a new chapter and massage my brow. My morbid curiosity had me first watching the entirety of its first season in a day and then catching up to its available manga chapters to the point where it was, for a time, like rubbernecking a beautiful car crash. 

Secretly, though, I hoped for a pivot—for Chizuru to wise up and leave Kazuya in an emotional landfill where he belonged. Despite their improbable chemistry hinting at genuine affection, it was a later arc of hers that caught me off guard—a storyline where she pursues acting and reveals that her rental gig was a means to support that dream. That made me feel things. 

Kazuya, by that point, had taken enough Ls to start resembling a functioning adult instead of a 2D wish-fulfilment entity for anime and manga’s most tragic fanbase. But of course, there’s a catch: the series drags. It drags. And Kazuya somehow becomes even more of a spectacle. Case in point is an infamous waterpark meltdown, complete with tears, jealousy, and a boner where the man is crashing out at the thought (which readers see in excruciating detail) of Chizuru bumping uglies with a male friend of hers. Peak narrative despair so cringe I’m surprised I didn’t Thanos snap into oblivion having read it.

What followed, surprisingly, was a glimmer of actual progress—their lie exposed by Kazuya’s ex, and a dramatic, full-spread kiss spurned by Chizuru to prove they were dating that duped Kazuya’s friends, family, and readers into believing we were headed into final arc territory. Closure is possible. 

It wasn’t. The series kept going. And the worst part? I kept reading.

Fellow anime connoisseur Geoff Thew of Mother's Basement and I have exchanged war letters (via Twitter DMs) about the series. Geoff’s long since tapped out. I, on the other hand, remain entrenched in the manga, reporting back like a shell-shocked soldier. And while Geoff has summarized the pain more concisely than I can without seeing red, the core gripe remains: this manga has become an exercise in narrative purgatory.

Kazuya and Chizuru both know they have feelings for each other. Everyone knows. And yet, instead of resolution, the story stalls—like a cat toying with its food, savoring the indecision. Chizuru has had the ball in her court for what feels like geological time, and the series seems intent on suspending the inevitable “let’s date” or “let’s just be friends” moment for maximum agony. Along the way, every romcom cliche and emotionally manipulative contrivance has been hurled at them to stretch the string taut: cohabitation shenanigans, Kazuya becoming her acting manager, a chorus of women (all but his ex) lining up to cheer him on like a dating sim with no bad route story branch. 

But then something happened. Around chapter 380, the pair is finally on their first real date. Let that sink in. In the time this saga has burned through endless trial runs of their date like it was an episode of The Rehearsal, entire romcoms—Komi Can’t Communicate, My Dress-Up Darling, Don’t Bully Me Nagatoro, and Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out—have wrapped up their burgeoning love stories with them getting together and ending the series. Rent-A-Girlfriend, meanwhile, is shaping up to be the One Piece of emotionally constipated romcoms. 

What’s especially wild, and why I lead with the manga suddenly being critical in the manga reading community, is that the series is at a strange narrative crossroads: it could deliver a long-overdue moral reckoning about transactional intimacy and the entitlement that festers around men regarding women…or it could go full tilt into rewarding Kakuya, breathlessly validating the worst kinds of reader fantasies. And the manga community is embroiled in a civil war over either outcome as the series progresses toward its conclusion. 

As mentioned earlier, the latest chapters finally gave us the date. I’ll spare you the minute-by-minute because, true to form, readers were subjected to every intrusive, obsessive, ogling thought Kazuya had overanalyzing Chizuru’s mannerisms from start to finish. At the end of their date, it finally happened: Chizuru accepted Kazuya’s feelings. She thanked him for loving her, and she even said she loved him too.

And then she rejected him. 

She reasoned that her lifestyle as a rental girlfriend and, more honestly, the emotional stage she was at in her life, wouldn’t allow for a relationship. Kazuya, for once, didn’t spiral. He was hurt, sure, but he took it in stride. A vocal subset of the fandom did not.

Many Rent-A-Girlfriend readers interpreted Chizuru’s rejection as a surprise, maybe even a subversive move—a long-con feminist parable about how affection and support shouldn’t entitle men to a relationship. But on Musk’s town square of terminal takes, the reaction to Kazuya’s rejection was nothing short of a riot. People dogpiled what looked like a rare, poignant moment of growth for Kazuya and branded the manga “peak cuck content.” Chizuru, in particular, was called everything outside her name, with some fans highlighting that Kazuya spent 250,000 yen on their dates and funded her career as evidence that she used him for emotional and financial labor, only to turn him down. One particularly heated reader went full unhinged, posting a manga edit of Jujutsu Kaisen’s Toji killing Chizuri. 

While I was initially championing the story for somehow surprising me by dovetailing into an essential lesson at a time when men aren’t doing okay and their manosphere pariahs aren’t helping, the manga, to my horror, appears to be spinning the block on its emotional breakthrough. In chapter 382, the story is hinting at their romance not being over, with Kazuya carrying Chizuru piggyback to their apartment after noticing her heel was bloodied from breaking in fancy new shoes—a quiet gesture he’s taken as a signal that their night matters to her, too. 

Odds are they’ll end up together anyway, wrapped in some breathless “it was all worth it” speech. But I won’t be sticking around to see it. I’ve watched this story loop around resolution like a broken record for years, clinging to the hope it might land somewhere bold. I’m not that teenager chasing trainwrecks anymore—I’ve got bills, better taste (in trashy anime), and better manga to read. Maybe it still turns the ship, but after that latest cliffhanger, I’m out. Not every trashy romance can pull off a trashy-meets-classy bonkers landing like Domestic Girlfriend. This is me breaking the cycle. Godspeed to whoever’s still riding this sinking ship.