When highschooler Mari bumps into fellow student Tsunagu while both are late for class, she's surprised to find out he's a beastfolk who's to attend her school. After all, it's not rare for beastfolk to coexist alongside humans, but it's still uncommon, with the prejudice and all. Nervous to meet one at first, Mari soon learns there's more to him than his exterior. In fact, the more she gets to know him, the more she finds herself drawn to him, his steadfastness, his kindheartedness, and his body...

Who's ready for a lot more people to get super defensive about whether or not they're furries?

Y'know, I was wondering when we'd get a show that's somehow hornier and even more blatantly laser-targetted at furries than Beastars. This might be one of the spicier public furry animations I've ever seen. Since it's only gonna get more intense from here, based on what people have told me, I'm very excited for various reasons. I'm also curious how the general public will react, because it feels like every year we get a new piece of media that forces everybody to unequivocally out themselves, even though I personally don't think appreciating some good furry media should be seen as a bad thing in the ass-end of 2025.

On paper, With You, Our Love Will Make It Through has a pretty simple story with a tried-and-true setup. We have a typical society that's slowly integrating beastfolk into itsself. The beastfolk make up a minority of the population--it's implied that they're the result of experiments from long ago, and they're even sectioned off in their own designated neighbourhood, complete with a checkpoint they must go through for the sake of "public safety". There are a lot of allegories that you can make about what the beastfolk could potentially represent in the real world. The idea that some people are just instinctively bullying Tsunagu, even though he hasn't really done anything, because his overall presence "threatens" them after he upset the local power dynamic" is very poignant. It doesn't really go anywhere in these two episodes, but I hope that if the show is going to tell this type of story, it doesn't conjure a strawman or sideline its themes.

There's an old Japanese saying, “The nail that stands up gets hammered down.” It means that if you stand out in society, you'll be forced to conform to social norms. But what happens if you can't? What if you're taller or stronger, or you have a different skin colour, or you can't or won't bend to the outdated gender expectations shoved at you? Do the social norms expand to include you, or are you simply forced out of society itself so that everything once again conforms to how it used to be? Two of the supporting characters exist to illustrate this. Aida represents the former end of this spectrum. He sees that his way of viewing the world has been upset and feels that this is a good thing. He's eager to travel into the unknown and explore his new social surroundings. Ochi, on the other hand, is opposed to the change. He wants things back as they were. He talks like his goals are pure. Tsunagu's OBVIOUSLY dangerous and he's upset order in the school by being physically different, thus he must be forcibly removed. Of course, his true reasons are far more selfish, whether he realizes it or not. He used to be at the top of the school hierarchy, and with Tsunagu around, he feels inferior, so he lashes out to feel better about himself. Overall, it's a solid look into the hows and whys of racism in Japan.

I love Tsunagu as a character. He's the soft-spoken gentle giant who's forced to be overly conscious and self-aware of how he relates to everyone else. He hates himself for acting on instincts he can't control and is always trying to put other people ahead of him, and you can tell it's not just because that's something he was told he needs to do, it's just genuinely how he is. I can see why Mari would be infatuated with him, but I also think the show might've shown its hand too quickly. Mari doesn't really give a reason, and it comes after such a physically intense scene, so it rang a bit hollow. I'm hoping we get more into the throes of what this relationship is actually like.

It was probably done to get to the explanation of these more passionate and intimate moments faster. In episode 2, it's implied that these moments are triggered by an oversensitivity to a partner's emotions. When our two leads are being casual with each other, things are fine, but when Mari seems to start desiring things, that is when Tsunagu starts to go haywire, pinning her down and sensually licking her neck and whatnot. It's interesting because it implies that the rather intense moments we've had so far are fully consensual dspite how they appear. It's nice that the show establishes that Tsunagu does have some control over himself in these situations, and that Mari does have the ability to say no. That's always a fine line you have to ride when dealing with subject matter like this.

And yeah, at this point it shouldn't surprise you at all that this story originated as erotica. Although the plot differs, featuring a human woman who enters the beastpeople village, author Chihiro Yuzuki's two-volume Hana and the Beast Man takes place in the same world as this one, prominently features the titular couple having sex, and is apparrently retroactively meant to be the story of Tsunagu's parents.

As for the intimate scenes themselves, well, the lighting for this show is pretty theatrical, with very heavy shadows outside of the comedic moments, to the point where it almost feels like watching it through blinds at times. It can be a little distracting at times, but it matches the wallflower effect the show is going for. It has a voyeuristic quality that gets your heart pounding. There's a lot of setup here for the world and its characters, and it looks really damn pretty to boot. I just hope there's more to all of this going forward than just an excuse to get Bao the Whale screaming in horny bliss for three months.

Also, if this gets dubbed and Bao isn't cast as Mari, the opportunity of the year will have been wasted.