Hi there and welcome to my very first blog post! I’m kinda excited, but I hope you’ll enjoy reading it!
Today I’ll be sharing my thoughs on the latest anime I finished: Love, Elections and Chocolate (Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate / 恋と選挙とチョコレート) or KoiChoco for short.
I will keep heavy spoilers to a specially marked section below, but I won’t promise I’ll do this for every little thing. Proceed at your own risk!

Please note that I watched the entire anime in Japanese without subtitles. While I’m confident I got at least the gist of everything that happened, I tried to follow the flow and not pause to look up words or rewind every single time I did not understand something. As such, there is a pretty good chance I missed a few small and maybe not so small details along the way.
This was also the first time I completed an anime in Japanese-only. That means watching anime now officially counts as Japanese practice. Yay!

Background & Premise

KoiChoco aired in 2012 and it is based on the visual novel of the same name. I haven’t played the VN but read a few things about it, and I’ll have to say that, at the very least, the nature of the source material becomes quite apparent in some places.
The anime consists of 12 episodes, plus one bonus episode which is set shortly after the end of the 12th episode.
It follows high school student Oojima Yuuki, a member of the food research club. That club’s sole purpose seems to be to provide a place to hang out and a budget to squander on sweets for its members. It comes as no surprise then that the club is threatened with disbandment as Shinonome Satsuki, head of the school’s department of finance, starts her campaign to run for student council president. Aiming to improve the school’s finances, she wants to disband clubs without a meaningful purpose, such as the food research club. Our club members then come up with a simple solution: they’ll just have to let one of their members run for president, make them win and the club would be saved. Our protagonist Oojima is forced into democratically chosen for the role.

So, how was it?

I went into this without any expectations, and I was, for the most part, pleasantly surprised. Just watching the first 3 or so minutes after the opening of the first episode immediately got me hooked. In a way.
Most of the cast of KoiChoco consists of funny and a bit peculiar characters. Just watching them interact and play off of each other made for good entertainment. The plot isn’t too complex, the drama is rather light (with a few exceptions towards the end of the show), the characters aren’t particularly original and so on. But for me, it still kinda worked, and in the end that’s all that counts.

That said, KoiChoco is far from having no faults. The last third of the show especially buries us in quite a bit of rushed drama, that turns out to have almost no relevance to the main plot. The cut-off between the original VN’s common route and the five character routes is rather noticeable. The source material had five routes, with each route corresponding to one romance option in the shape of one of the five girls you see in the thumbnail above.
But before we come to that, let’s go over the various elements of the show in a bit more detail.

The Plot

When it comes to the plot, there really isn’t too much to be said. The small synopsis I gave above almost says it all. Don’t expect any plot twists, and take a good guess who’ll end up winning the final election.
That doesn’t mean the election wasn’t well done though. It was treated with a good degree of realism and involved much less *winning through the power of friendship, natural charm and motivational speeches" sort of tropes that I expected to see. Besides Oojima and Shinonome, there’s only one other candidate running in the elections. Very realistic indeed judging by my highschool experience, heh.
The election itself was divided into multiple stages. Our newcomers were supported throughout the whole process by Mouri, an upperclassman and head of the school’s security force, who has his reasons for not wanting Shinonome to win. We can see our club members strategizing together with Mouri, thinking about who their target audience is for the election, searching for ways to gather funds for their campaign etc.. The anime didn’t dive into that too deeply, but kept it at a level that made the process tangible without bombarding us with heaps of unnecessary details.

One more thing to note here is that the school that serves as KoiChoco’s main stage is… special. Not only is it HUGE with over 6,000 registered students and the necessary buildings, including dorms. They also seem to enjoy a great degree of autonomy in many ways. As such the student council has a much more important role than in your average highschool anime. And if the mention of the school’s “security force” earlier tripped you up, here’s your explanation… I guess?
I can’t really judge how over the top that is, since we’re never really shown how far their world really takes this idea of a highly autonomous school and student body. That way, it still ends up feeling a bit like justification for the “all-powerful student council” trope. Which is weird and unnecessary, because it’s not really employed. The acting student council president is never so much as mentioned, and the anime literally just ends with the final result of the election. There was no need to even build up this image of a large and mostly autonomous school. While the idea itself is rather interesting in my opinion, the anime doesn’t go through with the idea and its implications like… almost every anime that does that.
To get back on track to where I was originially going with this, the school’s security force actually seems to be a pretty important institution. The same goes for the aforementioned department of finance, and at least one more department for… something. Sorry, I just couldn’t catch the word they used here. In any case, these institutions were actually used to build up some sort of “political conflict”, with these different institutions vying for power, cooperating or opposing each other, and generally being important players when it comes to the student council elections, who supports who, etc.
This did initially give off the sort of vibes you’d expect from a political thriller, with a bit of intrigue and secrets mixed in there, but in the end it didn’t amount to much. These institutions were supposed to be made up of several hundred students each, but we only get to see somewhere between 1 and 3 representatives for each of them. For the most part, they also didn’t seem to have any effect, besides just being large interest groups that would all vote together for the same person when the time for the election came. I gotta admit though that there were a few conversations between representatives of these institutions that I could barely follow, so I might be missing parts of the greater picture here.
So why are these institutions a thing? Why is the school so huge? Why do students seem to never have class or homework? Why do we only ever see a single teacher and no other adults? Why did I just write 400 words about these seemingly unimportant details?
In any case, that turned into a fairly drawn out paragraph just to question the writer’s choice of this “large and autonomous school” idea.

I’ve always been bad at keeping it short. And maybe I just enjoy turning my thoughts into written words a little too much.
This is the point where I finally realize I cannot possibly (or at least, really shouldn’t) put everything I have to say in here. Are you telling me I should have thought a little harder before I started writing? Oh well

Moving on, let’s get to…

The Characters

As I mentioned above, these aren’t anything to write home about, nothing you haven’t seen before. Mostly, it’s just their interactions that made KoiChoco so entertaining to watch for me. That said, it isn’t exactly what I would call comedy. KoiChoco didn’t make me laugh out loud like KonoSuba, but is just amusing.

The protagonist Oojima is your typical generic MC, who’s nice and likes to help others and has a surprising number of girls fall for him. I think that sums it up fairly accurately.

The next character we’re introduced to is Chisato (middle in the thumbnail). She’s the typical childhood friend character, has light Tsundere tendencies and is secretly in love with Oojima. Cue unnecessary jealousy. She also has a traumatic past that she overcomes towards the end in what I assume was originally her route in the VN.

Mifuyu (left of Chisato) is also a long time friend of Chisato and Oojima. And guess what, she’s also secretly in love with Oojima. She’s a calm, kind girl who suppresses her own feelings to try and help Chisato get together with Oojima, out of a feeling of gratitude and indebtness towards her. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like something I’ve seen 10 times already. Except I haven’t. Due to that, I actually found it interesting, though sad, to watch. I was dissappointed however that this was very clearly expressed in the anime, but neither the one-sided love between her and Oojima, nor the somewhat… in my opinion, problematic… relationship she has with Chisato is resolved in any meaningful way.

Next girl on the list is Shinonome (far right). Oojima’s rival in the election comes off as very serious and composed, maybe even stuck up at first, and she also… falls in love with him. Yes you read that right. Cue a lot of trou… no, actually no one seemed to be seriously bothered by this. I’m not sure whether I should laud the show for skipping over the unnecessary drama this would cause, or criticise it for being unrealistic. It’s moments like these where it becomes apparent that KoiChoco is, in some ways, rather simple and straightforward. In any case, Shinonome and Oojima often happen to meet per coincidence on the school grounds and have little chats. I was surprised to see these two very quickly develop a good chemistry and have the romance progress naturally over each episode. Watching them was just wholesome and cute, and I would have liked to see more of that.

There are several more club members, but I’ll skip over them as there’s not much to say here. They mostly don’t add anything to the plot and are just there for comedy and to “fill up” the food research club. They do that well enough and certainly give the club a lively, maybe even somewhat homely, atmosphere. Contrast with the more typical 3 or 4 member clubs you see in many highschool anime. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either.
Talking about the club, I was a little surprised that KoiChoco didn’t play the imminent disbandment of the club up to more drama. I expected at least one dramatic, motivational speech about how they would have to “protect this place full of memories” etc. but that never really happened. That only feels right though, after all we were introduced to the already fully assembled food research club at the beginning and then plunged straight into the election. We weren’t given much of a chance to follow along with their regular club activities and as such couldn’t get too attached to them. Naturally, that did make it a bit harder to empathize with those characters as they struggle to save their beloved club.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve skipped over the other two girls (routes) you see on the thumbnail. The reason is that Aomi (right of Chisato) is basically just… there… The show only really used her to exemplify the school’s bullying problems, which wasn’t properly handled or resolved either.
The other one is Morishita (far left), the (not actually) cat girl. I can’t say much about her, almost everything would be a spoiler. That was probably the only real surprise in the entire show and I really liked the episode where she was in the spotlight. Again though, that was rather short-lived and I wish we could have seen more of her.
In the end, there’s no way to fit all five (possibly contradictory) routes of the source material into a one cour anime. It is only natural they would have to cut out some parts here.

SPOILER TERRITORY

I’ll go into a bit more detail about the plot and especially the character drama that takes place mostly in the last 4 episodes of the anime. This will spoil two of the character’s routes and several other things.

Although I said it’s natural they’d have to cut out parts of the original VN, that doesn’t mean it was well done.
Chisato’s “character development” came out of left field and did not have any ‘weight’. Since her chocolate-loving little brother (last part of the title finally relevant!) died after being run over by a car several years ago, Chisato hasn’t been able to eat chocolate. She used to give chocolate to her little brother every day, but since he’s gone it seems like she’s using Oojima as a substitute. So she gives him a whole bar of chocolate every day and expects him to eat it. Does anyone else find this unintentionally funny?
In any case, in a later episode Oojima is almost run over by a car, leading to Chisato getting a panic attack, not letting go of Oojima’s arm for an entire day and refusing to talk. At some point Oojima gets tired of her behavior, refuses to eat the daily bar of chocolate she offers him and tells her to stop using him as a substitute for her little brother. While I do find the whole chocolate-thing a bit weird, this could have been the start for some proper drama of the good kind, and a bit of character development on top. What happened instead was that Chisato locked herself up in her room for a few days until Mifuyu comes to visit and tells her to stop being sad. Then she’s suddenly well again and shows Oojima that she even overcame her trauma, by biting into a bar of chocolate in front of him.

Okay, to be honest, I don’t have any problem with that particular imagery. In fact, if Chisato’s development was done better… if only it had some feeling of weight to it… then this would have been a pretty good way to wrap it up. But as it stands, it only felt rushed and almost devoid of meaning.
And that’s not even the end of it. In the next episode it seems like they start dating and they kissed. This was actually disappointing to watch, as these two don’t have much chemistry. Aside from Chisato’s bouts of jealousy, it never even felt like there were any romantic feelings from either side. And to top it all off, we already have another possible ship with Shinonome/Oojima that was teased over the course of almost the entire show, actually has good chemistry, a natural development and there seems to be clear romantic interest from both sides. Who had the shitty idea to build up a good ship over several episodes, then ditch it for the one that never felt right, while managing to still be predictable from the start?
Lastly, don’t expect Shinonome and Oojima to ever have any meaningful interaction again after that. Guess she just got cancelled.

And since we’re already speaking of Shinonome: what I can only assume was originally her route was compressed into a single episode. Remember when I mentioned there only seems to be one teacher in the entire school? That’s Shinonome’s sister Hazuki. Through the first seven episodes it becomes clear that the two sisters don’t get along too well, but all we’re ever told is that Hazuki has some sort of dispute with their parents and left their home due to that. Shinonome on the other hand gets upset about her sister’s behavior, so the relationship between them is also somewhat tense. Then in the middle of episode eight, Hazuki suddenly splurges all their deepest and darkest family secrets over 7 minutes, including the reason why she’s unable to stay at their parent’s home. So we’re finally given a reason for the conflict between them! Nice, I wonder what comes next. Oh, Shinonome understands her sister’s feelings now and the two reconcile. That’s sweet. Wait, that was it? There’s no consequences, no follow-up to this? The siblings just get along now, and the issue (including the problematic relationship between Hazuki and their parents) never really comes up again?
Just, wow. This whole conflict has been there for half the show without us ever even knowing the reason, and when we’re finally given the reason we also immediately get the resolution on top and… nothing of practical relevance even changes? Now if that doesn’t sound like a very similar disappointment I described only two paragraphs earlier!
At that point I honestly wonder why this was even included in the anime. It feels like they just tried to take what I assume are the highlights of the source material, and then somehow squeeze them into the anime next to the main plot by skipping all of the necessary build up and thus leaving the resolutions to those central conflicts bereft of any impact.

Another problem I had with the show was how it handled the school’s bullying problem. Actually, that’s inaccurate, as the problem is larger than that.
Apparently the school has a sort of scholarship system for students from poor households. These students do have to take on a bunch of additional duties, which is illustrated for us through Aomi. We get introduced to her as Oojima comes across her by chance while she’s hanging up posters in the school. There are several occasions where we’re shown just how bad Aomi’s life is.
In one episode we see her switching out lightbulbs in the school. She doesn’t stop even as it gets dark, since she hasn’t completed her task yet. At some point she calls her family and tells them to eat without her as she isn’t going to be back any time soon. That was surprisingly heavy and not something I expected to see in KoiChoco, considering how lighthearted and generally straightforward the show was until then. It gets even worse after that as we’re introduced to a group of girls whose only purpose seems to be to make Aomi’s life even worse. They are very cliché bullies who only seem to pick on her due to her scholarship status, labeling her as poor.
At some point, Oojima gets aware of the problem and adds an overhaul of the school’s scholarship system to his program for the election. That doesn’t sound too bad so far, right? Well that’s about the last time we heard of that problem. Are we supposed to just assume the problem is resolved when Oojima wins the election? I don’t know, and seeing that was disappointing.

This also leads me to the last point I wanted to make, questioning the very foundation of the show. The entire premise is that Oojima is running in the school’s election just to save his club. But Shinonome’s idea to abolish clubs like his doesn’t seem even the slightest bit unreasonable. Indeed, what right does the food research club have to exist? They only occupy one of the school’s room so they can hang out, and they even get a budget from the school which they waste entirely on snacks. What reason do we even have to root for Oojima?
Initially, that isn’t too hard to answer. After all, our protagonist is trying to save his club, a place full of fun memories with his friends, from being mercilessly abolished by the school’s bueraucratic apparatus in an attempt to improve their finances. That actually sounds like a classic anti-capitalist tale, doesn’t it?
But as the show goes on, it repeatedly undermines that seemingly solid basis. First of all, we’re shown that this isn’t the teachers or Japanese politicians imposing budget cuts for the school’s clubs, but it is Shinonome, another student just like them. Moreover, we learn that she isn’t the cold and calculating person that she seems to be - but is in fact very likable and only acts out of concern for the school and student’s well-being.
Even this might seem a bit vague at first, but that suddenly changes when we find out about the school’s bullying problem. Aomi is only half the reason Oojima realized this problem existed in the first place. The other half is that at some point Shinonome told him to read her manifesto for the election - which clearly adresses this problem, and also cites the necessary funds to fix it as part of the reason to prop up the school’s finances by abolishing clubs!
It was at this point that I seriously asked myself: what reason do I still have to support Oojima? His motivation now seems like nothing but childish resistance, with Shinonome being not just the more capable and experienced person, but she also has a much more solid reason to run in the election.
I’m not sure if this is one of those poorly resolved problems I mentioned before, or if the show wasn’t even completely aware of it. At several points Oojima was asked why he wants to run in the election, and the answer was always: to save their club.

Conclusion

Wow, turns out I had quite a few negative things to say about KoiChoco after all, but I want to emphasize:
KoiChoco surpassed my expectations by being surprisingly fun to watch. Neither the story nor the characters are anything to write home about and some of the later parts felt rushed and not properly resolved. But I still enjoyed watching it a lot and realised once again that you don’t always need one of the best anime out there to have a good time.

And with that, we’ve finally reached the end of this post.
Whew, that got a bit long, I didn’t expect it to turn out like this when I started writing. But I just enjoyed it so much and putting everything into words also helped me organize my own thoughts. At this point I feel like everything above is just an unorganised mess, but oh well… to everyone who made it this far down, thank you for reading my first blog post and I hope you enjoyed it!