Once upon a time, there was a girl who loved anime and realized that there was endless amounts of it on Hulu. She promptly subscribed, and got lost in anime for months. This is not her story.

This is the story of Momozono Nanami, who accidentally becomes a god.

One of the things I loved so much about Kamisama Kiss was that Nanami has a very distinct personality. From the start of the anime, she’s plucky and angry and stubborn. In fact, she borderlines to tsundere status – but Nanami is also gentle and infinitely honest and open about her feelings. She’s a complex person, which is rare enough to see on the anime screen. Women in anime are too often put into very specific boxes – the gentle, childlike love interest, the boyish tomgirl, the insane seductress. They’re stereotypes that parallel but do not overlap American patriarchal concepts of women. If you are sexually confident or open, you must be unhinged. If you are too loud, you should be available.

How rare, then, to see a loud, self-determining woman who is comfortable with her attraction to the main love interest but who nonetheless is not overly sexualized? Nanami has been betrayed continuously by men in her life, but chooses to give them second chances – on her terms. She balances strength and kindness, force and compassion, and stays true to herself, all while growing into a power. All of this while navigating a world of magic that is mostly foreign to her, full of demons and gods and every kind of creature between.

In short, I definitely recommend the main series of Kamisama Kiss, especially the first season.

However….

I do not recommend the OVA. Let us pretend the OVA never existed.

As often happens in anime adaptations of stories originally told in manga, pacing and plot resolution becomes an issue in Kamisama Kiss. We see this clearly with such classics as Fruits Basket, where an ending was tacked onto the anime that made no sense, all the way up to one of my favorites, Akatsuki no Yona (Yona at the Blush of Dawn) which just…ended without any resolution. In Kamisama Kiss, they managed a little bit of both. The ending of Season Two had far too many plot threads dangling in the wind. In order to fix these, a three episode OVA was made. It does succeed in collecting and resolving the major plot threads (though not all of them) but it fails to leave Nanami as a powerful individual at the end. She is forced to give up her god power and her new way of life in order to save Tomoe, the fox demon who has been acting as her familiar.

Questions about how they will survive together – and whether Tomoe successfully becomes human, a key requirement according to the dialogue – are never fully resolved on screen. Overall the ending seemed rushed and generally unsettled me, especially when Tomoe threatened to rape Nanami while she was incapacitated, an incident whose emotional repercussions were never fully addressed. While knowing what happened helped to sooth some of my feelings of being cheated at the end, the hopeful and emancipatory emotional resonance of the series was largely spoiled by the OVA plot.

Nonetheless, Kamisama Kiss remains one of my favorite recent shoujo forays and will intrigue those with an interest in Japanese mythology as well. Give it a watch.

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