REVIEW: ‘A Girl And Her Guard Dog’ Episode 3 — “Kisses And Love”

Probably one of the most controversial picks of the Fall anime season thanks to a—10-year age gap and bride-raising trope— A Girl And Her Guide Dog (Ojou to Banken-kun) is probably best watched not thinking about the issues with it. It reminds you…repeatedly of the age gap and, more specifically, how much Keiya Uto (Yûichirô Umehara) has raised Isaku Senagaki (Akari Kitô). In A Girl And Her Guard Dog Episode 3, “Kisses and Love,” the audience learns in no uncertain terms that Isaku isn’t in a one-sided crush on Keiya and that it is, in fact, reciprocated.

As someone whose most formative manga and anime romances were ’90s shoujo ones with large age gaps (and as someone who consistently dated older men), I tend to be more forgiving of the problematic trope than most. So, I took on the task of reviewing A Girl And Her Guard Dog, and it constantly yo-yos me between “Oh cute” and “Oh no.” In this episode? It’s more “oh no” than not.

A Girl And Her Guard Dog Episode 3 has two main narrative points. The first is Isaku pushing Keiya, who got a zero on his test—because our 26-year-old-lead apparently doesn’t know high school math—to study more and pass the exams coming up. If he does so, he gets a wish. When he does succeed, Keiya asks for a kiss. When Isaku is taken aback, he changes his tune and insists on a date to the amusement park instead. In just three episodes, any illusion of one-sided love is gone.

As the two have a day where they see each other more than just a guardian and a charge, the back half of the episode is actually adorable. The respect and understanding of the conversation and how they enjoy each other’s company works. Then Keiya decides to tell Isaku about how he’s only ever kissed women when he’s had sex with them as a way to confess his feelings for her. But the real kicker is that apparently, this guy, ten years Isaku’s senior, doesn’t understand love and wants her to teach him. Just, really? Throw in his explicit comments that he wishes Isaku could be swapped with the hostess who kissed him, and well, yeah.

When we look at the history of shoujo romances, and just romances in any genre, even outside of Japan, age gaps work when they allow the audience to dissolve the issue at hand. Manga like Yakuza Lover has done this by simply moving the age of the heroine to college or just leaving things one-sided and mostly platonic until graduation for high school-aged heroines. Or just mention it and completely move on, never to be heard of again.

But when you constantly bring up the gap, acknowledging how “wrong” it is, when intimacy conversations come up, well, weird doesn’t even begin to describe it. The series does nothing to hide the romance or interrogate it. While I can forgive two people so close to each other that they’ve made each other their worlds and are trying to navigate what is closeness and what is love, the closing of the episode pushes the big old red button for me to abandon ship.

Look, it may seem like this review exists to be a hater, as the comments on the Crunchyroll episode page may say. But age gaps don’t have to be bad and creepy, especially in this genre and demographic. However, this series doesn’t seem like it will be changing any time soon, but instead launching head first into worse.

A Girl And Her Guard Dog Episode 3 showed elements of the show’s potential, but it threw it away. Is this like the manga? Absolutely, but not every adaptation has to be one-for-one, and this series is absolutely worse because it is.

A Girl And Her Guard Dog Season 1 is streaming now on Crunchyroll.