AKA: おくさまが生徒会長！ (Okusama ga Seitokaichō!)

Genre: Comedy, rom-com, erotica.

Length: Television series, 12 episodes, 8 minutes each

Distributor: Currently licensed by Media Blasters, but also available streaming on crunchyroll.

Content Rating: R (Semi-nudity, numerous sexual situations, mature situations.)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: Virgin Night (Hentai)

Notes: Based on the manga by Yumi Nakata, serialized in Ichijinsha's shōnen manga.

Rating:

My Wife is the Student Council President

Synopsis

Losing the student council president election by a landslide to Ui Wakana and her proclamation to make love free in their school, Hayato Izumi returns home in annoyance only to find... Ui Wakana present and proclaiming herself his wife. Shenanigans ensue.

Review

I hate you, My Wife is the Student Council President. After reading your trite base synopsis, you showed up on Crunchyroll, just daring me to watch you. So I did.

Your main setup, where the girl randomly shows up in the main lead's home is as base as they get; low-effort wish fulfillment with cheesecake mixed in. And of course one of the male lead's friends give him a porn mag as he returns dejectedly home, and of course the female lead has assistants who threaten him humorously. And of course their opponent in the liberation attempts is like blown straight out of the nose of To Love-Ru's Yui Kotegawa. Though not the facistic anime version; this show's comedy isn't quite THAT bad. Though lord knows it ain't good either. Yui... er, I mean... Rin Misumi seems awfully petty for a student official, literally assaulting people just to stop them from holding hands, and confronts the student council as if this was a bet or a competition rather than a disagreement over ideals. She meets up with Ui and Izumi outside when it starts raining, and to avoid some former friends, Rin drags Izumi away... into a love hotel. Of course.

And that's not even getting started on the "paper doll on a wooden stick puppet theater" that shows up randomly during the show as I watched it. They tended to pop up when things were getting hot and heavy, and tended to reference something that happened in the episode or just throwing in some reference to something completely different that has nothing to do with the show itself. Neither of them were funny, and most of them were obviously in the show just so they could go "HEY HEY LOOK AT THIS AND DON'T TRY TO THINK TOO HARD ABOUT WHAT IT'S REPLACING!" Given the asinine contents without as much as a whit of humor, it did a pretty good job at that.

As I was about to give up on the whole thing, I noticed the dual setup of episodes, so I thought I should give what I thought was the dub version a go just to see what it sounded like. Then I realized they were still talking in Japanese, so I decided to keep watching to see what the difference was then. And boy howdy, did I ever find out. I wouldn't go so far as to call the uncensored version's scenes for direct sex, but My Wife is the Student Council President is pretty direct with the way Ui and Izumi come to term with their mutual attraction and... well, make out. There are some long and pretty damn hot kisses in there, not to mention scenes where our main couple are taking some minutes off to explore each other in a more... indepth manner.

And you got some nerve, My Wife is the Student Council President, to actually do this part amazingly well. I am dead serious; the sexual parts of the show literally salvage everything about it. You have to understand that anime in general treats eroticism like some kind of damn comedy tool, and if any is shown, it's usually portrayed as an accident or too dirty for consideration. When it comes to the whole "purity/pervertedness" scale, and the usual lack of balance therein, My Wife is the Student Council President is downright progressive in how it treats the moments between our two main leads as perfectly natural. Sure, Ui's little student council flunkie, Karen, tends to throw herself on the wild accusation express due to her fits of jealousy, but that's only one part of the show's terrible sense of comedy and doesn't have anything to do with the sexual stuff. What's more, Ui is usually the one to take the initiative, but the show treats that as perfectly normal too. There's not a whit of purity worshipping or slutshaming thrown in her direction, and it's actually nice to see Ui and Izumi connect, despite the latter's initial protests about her moving in with him. The presentation is leaning a bit towards male wishfulfillment, sure, but it's still incredibly sensible about it all. As Ui put it: "Don't you think accepting love in its entirety, even the ugly parts, is a beautiful thing?" I can't argue with that.

See, this is the kind of thing I meant when I complained about the duty-based sex in my review for The Testament of Sister New Devil. I said about that show that the sexual stuff wouldn't be so damn awkward and distasteful if the show had just let the two be naturally attracted to each other instead of just showing a magical horny-boosting curse on the girl in question. I mean... imagine watching The Testament of Sister New Devil and then imagine if Basara and Mio had acted like Ui and Izumi did in this show. Wouldn't that be a lot better? In fact, the same could be said about a lot of shows that otherwise mash up its male and female stars face-to-crotch or hand-to-boob purely by "accident". I hereby proclaim that any anime creators who want to create a harem should be forced to watch this show with a note pad in their hands. Learn from this, harem creators, and learn well.

The art and animation is fairly good for being a short animation piece like this. It's got some occasional scenes where the character art gets all wonky, a lot of scenes where we're clearly seeing a single cel being moved around to simulate depth and some of the more slapsticky moments tend to look like they were only animated by key frames alone. But on average, the show actually looks pretty nice. Ui is a pretty cute-looking girl-next-door type who's sporting a nice selection of amusing expressions and an impressive figure that you'll be seeing in detail from time to time, while Izumi looks like your average studious person, glasses and all. Though he, too, has a large range of expressions that he'll get to flaunt through comedy, good and bad. Mostly bad, granted, but his characters brings a sense of levity about the proceedings that dampens the blow some. Also, he's another member in the ever increasing family of guys who can take care of themselves at home, which is always appreciated.

The only parts about it that gets a bit weird is whenever we deal with Ui's mother, who for some godforsaken reason look like a little girl. The show also gets a little saucy with her, which I did not appreciate, but thankfully never takes that too far. I would've appreciated it leaving out the teases with her or Rin's flunkie, Sawatari Mato, but I can deal with it. It just makes no damn sense that they'd both look like single-digit age kids when they're a mother and a high school girl respectively. And the show treats that as a normal thing too for reasons that escape me.

It's a damnable conflicting thing. In its 12 episodes, the show only manages to eclicit a chuckle a couple of times, like when Ui is searching for the bathroom at night with a flaming torch in her hand. But, like I said in my opening statement, the show is amazingly lazy with its comedy and the main setup. Yet the occasional moments of sensibility kept me watching, and, as weird as I feel about it, the mature way the show presented itself about its more mature contents -- and this show has the right to call those moments mature both in a literal and figurative way -- eventually won me over.

It's a pretty weak three star, but it did something pretty original -- approached the subject of sex in a rather sensible and nonjudgemental manner -- so three it gets. — Stig Høgset

Recommended Audience: Given the main draw of the show, it'll probably get a NC-17 rating, but honestly, for being a show about something "dirty", it's remarkable clean about it. But yes, there is nudity and scenes where Izumi is getting an erection underneath his pants, as well as various scenes of non-penetrative sex acts -- izumi sucking on Ui's breast, Ui basically performing fellatio on Izumi's fingers or grinding her butt against his crotch -- so it's going to heavily depend on the lenience on the parents of whoever wants to watch this.