Twilight Out of Focus Review: Did it Deserve an Anime?
Let’s look at Twilight Out of Focus, after watching the first episode of the new anime, airing on Crunchyroll, I was left wanting a little more and I knew I had to immediately go read the manga. I will admit, I didn’t read the in-between stories of the other couples, I focused purely on Mao and Hisashi. So take what I’m about to say with a little grain of salt. I couldn’t help but wonder, why was this a candidate for an anime?
Film enthusiast Mao Tsuchiya and his lone wolf roommate Hisashi Otomo make three promises:
① That Mao will never tell anyone that Hisashi is gay and has a boyfriend,
② That Hisashi will never approach Mao “in that way,” and
③ That they’ll respect each other’s “private time.”
The second-years’ ground rules should ensure a peaceful life together in their dorm, but reality is never as simple as it seems in the movies, and some things are not so easily promised…
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Table of Contents
Review of Twilight Out Of Focus
The following review contains mild spoilers. Whilst I mainly cover the events of chapter 1-2 and anime episode 1, precede with caution!
Story
We begin Twilight Out of Focus with Mao and Hisashi as second years in high school, room mates boarding together and talking to a camera about promises they make for the upcoming year, as they had in the preview year. Rule 1; Mao will never tell anyone that Hisashi is gay. Rule 2; Hisashi will never come onto Mao. Rule 3; They will respect each other’s ‘alone time’. Pretty simple rules but as we all know, rules are made to be broken.
It’s a little cheesey but honestly pretty cute when you realise that the insinuation behind the promises is simply mutual respect. Respect is something of an important theme throughout Twilight out of Focus and it’s wonderful to see that within a BL. Directly after this I began reading a Korean web toon and the whiplash I got between the two was intense.
Mao’s film club decides they will go ahead and film a BL for their school’s film festival to try and beat out the third years project. The director asks Mao if he would ask Hisashi to be the main lead. Mao says he will, that Hisashi is perfect for the role, but once he begins to think about it he thinks ‘what if Hisashi thinks I outed him?’. This is fairly normal when your secretly gay room mate is suddenly asked to take part in a BL as one of the gay characters. He simply refuses to ask him, just incase Hisashi gets mad and thinks he broke his promise.
What Mao doesn’t know is that the director already went ahead and asked and Hisashi already agreed to play the role. Hisashi says they will talk about it later in the room where they can relax and watch a movie together. This is actually a really adorable scene where they’re just relaxing together. Mao starts to understand that he maybe has feelings for Hisashi during chapter one and things move pretty fast from there.
Upon Hisashi breaking up with his boyfriend, Mao confesses to him. In chapter 2. Now, some people might really like this, but I like my stories to be a little bit of a slower burn than this. This feels incredibly fast. There was very little build up and there was almost zero pining. Okay, we precede to pine a little after the confession, but the lead up to the confession gave me a bit of whiplash.
From here on out we really see things proceed very quickly and these boys act exactly like you’d expect teenage boys to do so when left alone with your partner. They have sex… a lot.
How did this get an anime?
Now, give that this has an anime, and a pretty mainstream one at that, it sure has attracted a lot of attention, I was incredibly surprised by the explicit nature of the manga. Usually, when BL gets an anime it’s because it’s wholesome and doesn’t involve a lot of sex.
Looking at other mainstream BL anime; Given, Tadaima Okaeri, Sasaki and Miyano, and Seaside Stranger, they all have one thing in common, the manga doesn’t really contain any sex scenes. Of course, it’s mentioned, there are references to it, but it’s never explicitly there. In fact, Seaside Stranger, the only one of these that does explicitly ‘show’ sex or shows the characters interest in sex, was a movie, a direct to streaming movie (outside of Japan). Not a series.
I can hear you all the way from over here; what about Banana Fish? Banana Fish is a whole other category of anime. Yes it’s sort of in the mainstream, but I’d say it’s themes and the story are far more adult in nature and therefore it occupies the adult genre of anime, similar to Twittering Birds Never Fly. Also, it took 40 years for Banana Fish to actually get an anime.
Twilight Out of Focus falls far more into the previously mentioned BL genre of innocent high school love. So, when I picked it up, I started reading it on the train to work because I expected something more akin to Given and Sasaki and Miyano. Oh boy was I wrong. Not only does Twilight Out of Focus deal with the theme of child grooming but it also contains a lot of explicit sex scenes, which they’re probably going to cut out of the anime.
This then leads me to the question; why was this picked for an anime adaptation when the manga is so explicit? Well, I don’t really have a concrete answer for this. Of course, it could just be that the wholesome teenage love is what drove the decision and the unique nature of the storyline being built around movie making. It is cute and it is a really wholesome story. It’s the kind of story that draws you in and makes you want to read more and more. Which I can attest to as I missed my train stop whilst reading it and had to double back on myself.
Whilst the characterisation is fairly basic, the art style is unique, the story line is fun and the roommates/forced proximity trope kind of made Twilight Out of Focus the perfect storm for an anime. It’s sure to be a crowd favourite as it goes on, even for non manga readers.
Rating
When rating this manga, I really wanted to give an accurate depiction of the story and characters, as well as how I felt reading it for the first time. Here’s the scorecard;
Overall
Overall, I think Twilight Out of Focus deserves to be squarely in the 4-5* category. This is a really cute manga, and the only thing taking away a star, for me, is that it moved super quickly between ‘oh wow I might be gay too’ and ‘I am in love with you’. The build up just wasn’t there and I prefer a little pining with my romance.
Spiciness
I gave Twilight Out of Focus a 1 on the spice-o-meter. It’s pretty vanilla, they do have sex, but it’s incredibly tame and very loving. Not spicy, just sweet.
Fluffiness
Twilight Out of Focus deserves to be high on the fluff-o-meter. It’s an incredibly sweet high school romance story. It made me ‘aww’ out loud a few times and therefore, it’s a solid 5 on the fluffiness for me.
Red Flags
Whilst I would say there aren’t any red flags between the characters, Hisashi’s backstory does contain childhood grooming and therefore, it needs one red flag, mostly as a warning to you to proceed with caution if it’s a trigger for you. Twilight Out of Focus does do an amazing job at calling it out for what it is, and it isn’t present throughout the whole story, it is still there.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I believe that Twilight Out of Focus, is an incredibly sweet story. It really shows the cute side of high school romance whilst keeping it mostly realistic. Even though it moved a little too fast for me. I can see why it got an anime, and I’m happy that it did. I hope that Twilight Out of Focus paves the way for future BL to also get anime adaptations, like they deserve.
