A girl named Ema moves in with a large group of her new stepbrothers and things sort of happen in the first episode of Brothers Conflict. With her famous adventurer father remarrying, Ema decides to move in to the mansion of her new brothers. All 13 of them. As she is introduced to each of them, she grows a little bit closer to them and that will ultimately get her romantically involved with multiple brothers and you probably get the rest of the story by now. It’s that sort of story.
I was surprised at first to find that this was adapted from light novels. Then I remembered that popular fiction is now in the era of catering to fans who ship characters. As a result, this feels like it was cruel on the production staff of this adaptation to make something based on a novel that was written by committee. I say that because could you imagine Twilight with 13 different men after the affection of Bella, and the novels continuously dragged out with no ending in sight just to make more money. I’d even go so far as to say that it doesn’t make a shred of difference if this series fails commercially as an anime as long as the books continue to roll off the assembly line and fans continue to buy them.
Let’s just look at this first episode. It’s clearly a rush job to try to introduce all 13 brothers in a single episode. As a result, some sacrifices had to be made. Those include giving Ema any sort of emotions at all. Plus a talking squirrel called Juli provides all the Basil Exposition you never wanted to hear. The brothers themselves provide ever more evidence of the amount of groupthink that went into this project. They have a wide range of ages (10 to 31) and occupations between them to appeal to any constituency. Are you a complete shotacon, then Wataru is your ship. Like twins who are (probably BL) voice actors, they have those too. There’s a lawyer, a monk, an author and many more ridiculous character types that few will find no characters they are into if they want to ship. Ema, though, is just the self-insert character they all pursue despite the fact she has the emotional depth of a stick of gum.
As for the production quality, it’s frankly appalling and rushed. Like I said earlier, this exists just to promote the books. It doesn’t matter a bit how good this looks as long as BroCon continues to be on the mind of those who would buy the light novels.
Reasons to Continue Watching
- Optimistic view of wealth and inequality in Japan
- Something that will cater to any demographic of shipper
- A talking squirrel, you saw Darker than Black and that was good, right?
Reasons to Drop
- It’s an advert for the light novels
- The production crew clearly hates the source material as well, but they need the money anyway
- Possibly the worst looking show this season
My Verdict: If you really want the BroCon experience, grab the light novels since this isn’t worth anyone’s time as anime. Fujoshi anime fans deserve better than this, but too often they get taken for granted on mailed-in focus grouped ideas like this.
Lower Mid-Table 