plus sized misadventures in love 🩷

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is a popular adage. Usually it’s said within the context of life altering events that have the potential to change a person, seemingly down to the molecular level.

Only, sometimes, the things you experience don’t leave you as a stronger person.

Sometimes these life events pushes you past your limits.

For Yumeko Koda, this is seemingly the case.

Unbridled self loading, rampant insecurities, and probably undiagnosed mental health struggles led her to attempting to taking her life.

Or did she?

Plus-Sized Misadventures in Love definitely loves a good plot twist, and boy is it a wild ride.

Welcome back to pages&pixels.

Let’s get into this week’s anime review.

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The outside world is blurred, bokeh lights twinkling on the screen while the siren of an ambulances fades in.

In an internal monologue, Yumeko says, “I deserved it. Someone who looks like me should have never fallen for someone as beautiful as you.”

A mirror shatters as we finally see Yumeko, perhaps an internal view of how she sees herself. Her eyes are sad, her hair is slightly disheveled.

The ambulance speeds forward and we in the audience can hear the heart monitor beeping melodically.

In pain, be it from her physical injuries, or the old wounds sustained from living a life that was seemingly slipping through her fingers, Yumeko welcomes death with hopes of being reborn as someone else.

Maybe someone someone beautiful enough to be worthy of the man she has fallen for.

The heart monitor flatlines, fades to black and two people are calling out to her gently.

Who are they though?

And who is Yumeko?

Because of her injuries, Yumeko has lost part of her memories. She has no idea of who she is or what she looks like, and she doesn’t realize that the two people who are in the room with her are her parents.

She asks for a mirror and her mother tells her that she better not break her phone because usually she breaks them.

Upon opening the front camera, Yumeko pauses.

She asks if this is what she looks like.

Her parents brace for impact, but there’s no need.

Yumeko is a new person.

She gushes about how beautiful her skin is, her “cute, sparkly, puppy-like eyes.” And this immediately throws her parents for a loop. Could this really be their daughter?

The person in front of them is, in fact, Yumeko Koda, their daughter, but she has retrograde amnesia. The physician says it’s not totally unusual for people’s personalities to change. What’s even more surprising is that Yumeko survived a four story drop.

When Yumeko returns home, she examines her living space. It’s a bit messy and her wardrobe isn’t something she could want to wear now, but she realizes that she doesn’t have any mirrors.

She suffered from such intense loathing that she couldn’t even stand to look at herself.

Yumeko tries to put together pieces of her life before her injuries.

On her phone, there are hardly images of herself, mostly images of food, and then a secret folder called, “My Happy Place,” where Old Yumeko had apparently been stalking someone, secretly taking images of them.

While trying to figure out who her old self is, her mother knocks on the door and asks when she’s going back to work.

That’s when we find out that Yumeko is 24 years old and works a professional job.

Yumeko goes back to work. On her way to the office she really takes in the small things that become mundane, even the sun that’s in the sky.

Almost to the office, she walks by a park that is in the middle of this business plaza. She goes in and there’s the guy from the photos and from the small blip of memory at the beginning of the episode.

The man is hunched over breathing heavily and Yumeko tries to make him feel better, even running over to hold water in her hands from the water fountain for him to drink from. Obviously, he rejects her offer, but Yumeko isn’t deterred from his somewhat skittish demeanor.

She tells him that it’s probably better that he go home to rest if he’s unwell, which he says he can’t. Yumeko over shares and talks about how she almost died and took time off and now she’s now in tip-top shape.

No one expects for someone to blurt something like that out, but Yumeko is on a roll. She notices he’s got dark circles and reprimands him for not getting enough rest. This softens him up and makes him laugh.

She takes him as flirting and runs off.

Yumeko makes it up to her floor to the Planning Division where she works and everyone is put off by her new sparkly personality.

Her supervisor Chief Maezono approaches her and asks her if she…survived?

Though the translation is a bit weird to me.

Mazezono says, “Koda, omae… bujida-ta?”

So to translate this to, “Koda, did you survive?” is a little wonky to me and makes it a bit more sinister. This may be because this isn’t just a romance anime, it is a romance, comedy, mystery anime.

I digress.

Yumeko is joined by another coworker, Tamai-san, and they head into a meeting with the Chief of the Planning Division.

The task of the meeting is to develop a new snack that will be popular with the general public. They’re struggling to create ideas so Yumeko looks for any hints from her old life and finds her idea notebook.

While flipping through it, she finds old ideas and also some of the darkness of her old self. Yumeko had been berating herself, calling herself fat and worthless and a pig who shouldn’t speak.

The new Yumeko decides to speak up and share this idea. Everyone is surprised, but they go forward with her plan. And Yumeko fills the page up with affirmations.

Her phone rings and when she answers, Officer Tamigawa from the Aoyama Police Department is on the line. Her attempted suicide is actually being considered to be an attempted murder plot. They found evidence that Yumeko had held into the railing after she’d gone over, and that there might even be other evidence that she didn’t jump on her own.

Despite losing her memory, they’d like for her to come in and answer some questions to help them with their investigation.

After getting off the phone, Yumeko makes a remark of how this is like a plot from a movie. Maybe they’re spies, or maybe men are fighting over her. Either way, she’s a beautiful woman, so she can understand why she feels that way.

Perfectly timed lunch hunger hits her and she returns to reality. She ends up asking Tamai to go with her.

Yumeko enjoys a large lunch and the men watch in horror watching her eat, even mentioning that she’s eating like “three day’s worth of food.” They even, shamelessly call her fat in a demeaning way to her face.

Not even missing a beat, Yumeko says that because she eats as much as she does, she’s able to maintain such a beautiful body. (I’ll be coming back to this later, don’t worry.)

Tamai-san chimes in saying that Yumeko is lucky because if she overeats her face gets round. (I will also be getting back to this)

Yumeko responses that women are even more attractive with a bit of extra weight.

After lunch, there is tension that seems to be growing between the two women. Not on Yumeko’s part, but on Tamai-san’s part.

She asks Yumeko why she even bothered to speak up when she usually doesn’t say anything at all. Yumeko reveals all of her ideas that she’s had since working at the company. All of her silence wasn’t just her sitting there doing nothing, she just hadn’t had the confidence to speak up.

At her desk, Yumeko had 10 notebooks filled to the brim with ideas for snacks.

Tamai-san clearly is bothered by Yumeko’s new outgoing and engaged personality.

This is further confirmed when the Chief comes by and tells them that he’s going with Yumeko’s idea. Tamai-san is frozen in place, shaken by this news. By the end of the episode, we get more insight into her feelings.

Tamai-san hates that Yumeko has changed for the better. She wishes that she was a quiet, gloomy fat girl that did nothing at all.

Oh, and those 10 volumes of ideas that Yumeko had at her desk? They’ve gone missing.

Plus-Size Misadventures in Love is a 12 episode anime that really takes you on an interesting ride.

When I saw it on Anilist I was intrigued because it’s not very often that there are plus size main characters.

Romance with an attempted murder plot?! Sign me up.

I appreciated that this wasn’t going to just be a run of the mill story and as I’ve watched the series, I’ve been enjoying myself for the most part.

Yumeko is an endearing character. To see this complete 180 in personality to where she’s engaged and active in her own life is so refreshing.

But, before we get into what I loved about this show, let’s talk about my two biggest gripes about Plus-Size Misadventures in Love.

Gripe #1

The way that Yumeko’s fatness is animated is actually ridiculous at times. There’s no sugar coating it, there’s no massaging it, they just make her into a single cell organism—a blob.

So, if you’re plus size and looking for reasonable, non-ridiculous looking representation of plus size girls in anime…you’re only kind of going to get it.

What I don’t understand is why there wasn’t a discussion about how Yumeko was going to be animated from certain points of view, again, to be fair I wasn’t in the room, so it’s possible that it was.

While I watched I had genuinely questions. Does anyone not know how to animate someone who is fat with a round face? Double chins?

Plus size people come in all shapes and sizes and you can be a plus size person with a very round face and a larger neck, but from my perspective, a bit of shading is all that was really needed.

Yes, I’m aware of what Yumeko looks like in the manga, but for god’s sake plus size people are real people and deserve characters that don’t look like caricatures.

So, I guess this isn’t just a gripe about the anime, but also with with the source material. That being said, I don’t want anyone to think that I think Yumeko is “too fat” or anything like that. I definitely don’t.

I just think that she could have been drawn with a bit more intention. Even if she has fat features like a double chin or a very round face. Which is a shame because there is some beautiful animations in the intro of Yumeko from different positions that don’t show up in the anime very often. It me, it just felt like there were times when the ball was dropped.

I want to be absolutely clear about this as well. Animating fat or plus size characters with things like rolls, or cellulite is something that should be done. Yumeko is plus size, she clearly has a double chin, and that’s fine, but to draw her face as essentially a blob like structure is unacceptable.

Gripe #2

My second gripe about this anime is that while Yumeko is quite adept at turning people’s fatphobic and cruel comments into positives, I hate that she doesn’t have a chance to just mollywhop people who speak to her that way.

She spends more time actively defending the main character Keisuke Yuki than she does herself. The police that are suspecting various people including Keisuke, will get an earful from Yumeko, but if someone lobs a fat joke or makes fun of her for her size, she doesn’t react the same way.

Yumeko’s transformation into someone else is only half believable in this way. She’s gained all this confidence and loves herself no matter what, but isn’t keen on telling people to shove their hurtful comments where the sun don’t shine?

I’m not expecting Yumeko to get violent, per say, but handing out verbal lashings to people who are trying to hurt her would be much more believable. The change can’t just be about how she sees herself, it also has to be about how she allows other people to interact with herself.

Though, I guess you could say this may be a lingering habit from the old version of herself, especially when you see how her own mother speaks about her.

During the show, we do find out that Yumeko’s mother was a person in her life who spoke awfully to her. Standing up to your own mom when she nit picks everything about your weight is just the first step to establishing boundaries with other people.

As I watched the interaction with Yumeko and her mother, I realized that Yumeko is similarly sized to her dad. He’s not fat, but he’s got a dad bod that’s soft and round, while her mother is thin. Maybe her mom blames her father for Yumeko being a fat kid and adult.

I’m not all negative about Plus-Size Misadventures in love.

My biggest praise about this show is that Yumeko Koda isn’t just fat or plus size character. Yes, her fatness is a central part of her character, but she’s not one dimensional. Even though she’s got this new persona because of trauma, doesn’t mean that parts of her old self don’t leak through.

I think it’s really good that this element of her rediscovering herself isn’t just attached to this possible attempted murder plot, it really is part of her building a new self. It’s not like these memories don’t exist and can never come back.

Old Yumeko is sill Yumeko.

One day there may not be a barrier of amnesia between who she used to be and who she is now, so it’s best to acknowledge that who she was before this incident is someone who was also deserving of love and care.

I greatly appreciate that Yumeko doesn’t shit on her old self. Whenever I see that there’s a plus size girl in an anime, there’s always this need to make her lose weight to be able to embrace herself and to have other people embrace her.

Yumeko loves on her body in such a gentle way, a way that she’s always deserved to be treated.

Which is another thing that I really loved about this anime is that Yumeko doesn’t wait for anything. She jumps at every opportunity to make her life as full as possible, including romance.

Keisuke is the main love interest in this story and Yumeko doesn’t back down from perusing him. So what if people think she doesn’t have a chance? Keisuke engages with her like any other person, fat or not, and I love that.

Though, I’m not sure how if it all works out if he’s the one who actually tried to kill Yumeko…

Guess you’ll have to find out if it was Keisuke or the Chief or maybe Tamai-san by watching the anime yourself.

I’m giving Plus-Size Misadventures in Love a 2.5 out of 5 stars ⭐

Welcome back to 📖pages&pixels👾✨

Friends, I’m sorry I was away for so long. I’ve been making major life adjustments in my professional life and creating content kind of had to take a back seat.

I’m working on building out a structure where in times when I need to step away, I’ll have a lil something for y’all!

Man, Plus-Size Misadventures in Love was a fun watch. Genuinely the only thing that was distracting for me was the way they chose to draw things like Yumeko’s chin. Just a smidge more shading would have helped so much, or at least some consistency?

I think this is kind of a problem in the anime industry at large so now I kind of want to watch more anime featuring plus size characters. Do you have any suggestions?

Also, have you seen Plus-Size Misadventures in Love? What did you think of it? A hit or a miss or somewhere in between?

Thanks for being here this week! I hope you had a great time reading my anime review!!

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