“Become My Closet”
What They Say:
Takane Takamine is the goddess of her high school. With perfect grades, athletic prowess, and unrivaled beauty, this student council president is the apple of everyone’s eye – including Koushi Shirota, a below-average student with no friends or social prospects whatsoever. But he’ll soon find out the secret behind Takamine’s unbelievable success – her underwear! When she strips, she can undo any of her past actions, and now that Koushi knows, Takamine won’t let him off so easy…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
One series I was surprised to some degree that got a Crunchyroll pickup was this one as it’s a bit smuttier than they usually go for. The project is based on the manga by Yuichi Hiiragi which kicked off in 2019 and has ten volumes out so far with an English release through Yen Press. The adaptation itself has set Tomoe Makino to direct it from the scripts by Yu Sato. Makino has some good credits to their name, including both seasons of Aharen-san, but also the Woodpecker Detective’s Office, while Sato has a smaller list of credits but worked on all of Ninja Slayer to projectsl ike Sorairo Utility. Liden Films has definitely grown and changed over the years to meet the needs of each project and they generally have some strong production values and ways of executing a work depending on the material, which had me interested in how they’d handle this.
The show opens in a way to make clear that Takamine has been a goddess of the school since he first year with all that she’s involved in and just how she handles it all with grace and ease. It’s in stark contrast to Shirota, a young man who has no friends, the worst grades, and no real life. They’re pretty much the polar opposites on the high school spectrum here, though he obviously admires and idolizes her. Where everything goes off the rails is when he’s hanging out in the athletics storage room and Takamine walks in while he hides and she undresses and changes her underwear, essentially giving him a good view. What he didn’t realize at the time but later discovers is that her special ability is to undo parts of her recent past by stripping down like that and do it over. We see this play out when during class she gets a test returned with a 98 score and when the teacher refuses to admit it’s a grading error, she strips down right then and there to undo things. While everyone else forgets all of this as she rewinds time, Shirota doesn’t and thus begins their new imbalance and awkward relationship between the two.
While he initially thinks its deja vu, Takamine eventually draws him into her special office in order to deal with it as she recognizes that she’s been seen, and tries to use the power to alter this in order to control him more, going into full domination mode. Her going into how her power works and all that’s involved is pretty straightforward but the dismissive aspect of her toward him is pretty amusing because she intends to use him to her advantage. Since when she uses the ability her underwear disappears, she basically needs him to be her closet and have clothes for her when needed. It’s an absolutely goofy thing that’s reinforced by her going over how she’s used it to excel in school and sports for so long and just how proud she is of it. That she’s been doing this since fifth grade is pretty impressive though her tale of how she discovered it is comically hilarious for her to reveal. But it’s all in an effort to secure what she needs from him. And knowing her social status and appearance, she’s easily convinced that she can woo him to her needs since it’ll work out for him on some level. And when you consider that Shirato is just some dumb teenage boy, it seems like a smart gamble.
In Summary:
The opening salvo of Please Put Them On, Takamine-san is pretty tame overall, even though it does get into some good fanservice and groping. It’s kept very small as it’s almost exclusively focused on just these two characters and that’s a plus since they’re at complete opposite ends of the social spectrum and are, quite honestly, lonely people because of it. She’s definitely taking advantage of him here but you can see the throughline for her character as it progresses. And it’s made clear just how manipulative she will be to get what she wants, going by the last few minutes and the uproar she causes. I can see quite clearly why this show won’t appeal to a lot of people and it’ll get some warranted criticism, but I’m curious to see just how far it’ll go since it can undo things along the way and what that can lead to as Shirato has to learn to navigate this new life.
Grade: B
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
