After his father remarries, Yuuta Asamura gets a new stepsister, Saki Ayase, who happens to be the number one beauty of the school year. They promise each other not to be too close, not to be too opposing, and to simply keep a vague and comfortable distance, having learned important values about relationships from their parents' previous ones. Saki, who's worked alone for the sake of her family, doesn't know how to properly rely on others, whereas Yuuta is unsure of how to truly treat her. Standing on fairly equal ground, these two gradually learn the comfort of living together. Their relationship progresses from strangers to friends as the days pass.

Man, a couple of minutes into the premiere of Days With My Stepsister, I already had some good jokes to use as a hook for this review. I was planning to go with "Somebody needs to establish a Bureau of Accidental Incest Prevention in Japan, so we can make sure these wacky single dads don't keep suddenly remarrying women with hot daughters for their sons to develop inappropriate feelings for!" As it turns out, Days With My Stepsister isn't that kind of show. At least, it sure as hell doesn't seem like it's trying to be such ludicrous trash. Yuuta and Saki really come across as two relatively believable teenagers navigating the strange circumstance of waking up one day to find out you have a new parent and sibling to learn how to live with. The closest we get to anything you'd expect by now based on the premise is when Yuuta stumbles upon one of Saki's lacy bras while helping her unpack, and the show treats it like the slightly awkward but completely uneventful non-issue it would actually be in real life.

On the one hand, this makes Days With My Stepsister a breath of fresh air. Yuuta is not the prototypical self-insert dude whose only hope for romantic salvation is for a gorgeous and unusually intimate girl to literally be forced into his life by the whims of their parents. Saki is not whichever of the different cliches that the female lead usually has to be in order to possess the lack of social and moral qualms necessary to be cool with dabbling in faux incest with her reasonably attractive new brother. They're just two normal kids. The fact that their parents are being given a shocking amount of warm characterization also makes me think the show might be content to let the family stay functional, rather than going the route of ripping the poor parents' relationship apart so as to make their kids' love feel marginally more acceptable in the eyes of society.

On the other hand though... This show is unbearably dull. That's the other side of the coin when it comes to treating your characters like real people instead of emotionally unstable drama dolls, I suppose. Most of the time, two families moving in together turns out exactly like this, people just living their daily lives with more than your usual amount of icebreakers and conversations about house rules and whatnot. What's more, Days With My Stepsister seems unaware of how boring its subject matter fundamentally is in this first episode, because it has this overbearing treacly piano score that insists upon itself so damn much, even when literally nothing of interest is happening onscreen. Like that scene I mentioned earlier, when Yuuta gets his whole family chuckling over a misplaced bra--why on Earth does the background music of an unpacking montage sound like it was ripped from the cathartic climax of a Ghibli movie?

Additionally, maybe the grounded cinematography threw it into relief, but the script kinda stinks. Saki and Yuuta don't have any "getting to know you" conversations or awkward small talk. Instead, Saki launches straight into trauma-dumping about how she had to raise herself in her small apartment since her mom's schedule as a hostess meant that she was too busy to actually be a mom. A discussion about Yuuta's oddly formal language transitions into her telling him how she cut off her friends for being rude about her new family situation. But it's fine because she "can't read their minds." When Yuuta offers to help her unpack, I can't help but feel like he doesn't know how to respond to all that she just put out there and feels uncomfortable. I know I would.

There's an argument to be made for the reason this show's premiere has such glacial pacing. The premise seems to be the deconstruction of the stepsibling romance trope, at least in the characters' heads (and no promises that it won't turn into an affirmation of the trope later on), and two strangers suddenly being forced to live together can be intensely discomforting. Neither Yuuta nor Saki are all that keen on their parents' remarriage, although they're also not dramatically opposed to it--they're just trying to figure out how it's going to change their lives. The changes seem to be more drastic for Saki, since not only is she living in a new house, but her mother's schedule is implied to have changed a lot too. And even if she is still working nights, the presence of Yuuta and his dad means she's no longer a latchkey kid. Both of those factors are beautifully demonstrated by the post-credits scene where she first forgets to turn off the hall lights, then has to figure out which switch will do it.

So I do appreciate what this is trying to do. In some ways, it's setting itself up to be the anti-incest romcom. The problem is that, again, it's boring. Scenes like the aforementioned light switch debacle drag on just a little too long, to the point where several times I had to check to make sure the video player hadn't frozen. Day-to-day details are all treated with a seriousness they don't need. Saki finding old stickers on her closet door and realizing that little Yuuta put them there is one thing, showing people opening and unpacking boxes is quite another, and the episode has trouble realizing that not everything is symbolic and beautiful. All of the shots of flowers in the world can't change the fact that there are some lines in the source novel that are better skipped than animated.

And I can't stress this enough, I will give the show credit for not having Saki freak out when Yuuta finds her bra, she just laughs it off like anyone else. There's also no moments of panic when Yuuta realizes he'll be expected to cohabitate with a girl his own age, he's more mildly annoyed that his dad waited until he was engaged to a woman with a kid his son's age before bothering to tell said son he was even dating. But that's the overall feel of this episode: Mild. Mild surprise, mild annoyance, mild amusement, mild actions, etc.

I can see the bones of a good idea here. There's some solid characterization for the main characters, like how Yuuta seems to constantly apologize for taking up space, or the ways Saki has internalized being alone. These are fine pieces to build something on, but the episode never capitalizes on that. By the episode's end, Yuuta and Saki's understanding of one another hasn't advanced or changed since their first conversation. Call it a slow burn if you want, but when the pilot doesn't even finish assembling the kindling, it's hard to want to wait around for it to find a match. At the end of the day, while I appreciate the vibe that Days With My Stepsister is going for, I can't imagine myself watching much more of it unless it starts getting a lot more interesting. Without suddenly resorting to an incest-flavoured curveball.