WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Love of Kill Episode 1, "What's Your Name?", now streaming on Crunchyroll.
The Winter 2022 anime season has arrived, and it offers an exciting mix of new and returning anime titles, from Attack on Titan to Tokyo 24th Ward and My Dress-Up Darling. This season also brings viewers an intriguing new romance anime that represents a convergence of the shojo, seinen and josei genres -- Love of Kill.
Love of Kill may remind anime fans of hit series such as Kaguya-sama: Love is War or movies such as Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but there's more to it than that. While Love of Kill is officially a shojo anime, it manages to appeal to fans of the josei demographic and the seinen demographic, which is part of a healthy trend in the anime industry as a whole. Anime needs more of this.
Love Of Kill Blurs Demographic Boundaries With Its Central Romance
Love of Kill's debut episode quickly establishes the tense but amusing central romance of the series, involving the gorgeous but stern bounty hunter codenamed Chateau and her enthusiastic but mysterious would-be lover, a fellow named Song Ryang-ha. These are both professional killers, but instead of trading bullets, Chateau and Ryang-ha trade verbal barbs as their bizarre romance takes root in the anime's first episode.
For unknown reasons, Ryang-ha is smitten with Chateau, and he insists on a Christmas Eve date with her in exchange for taking care of Chateau's most dangerous assignments without being asked. Chateau reluctantly accepts, and while sparks don't exactly fly, the two characters certainly have on-screen chemistry, and they are bound to see one another again soon.
This enticing central romance establishes Love of Kill as a shojo series, but it's not exactly a Maid-Sama! or My Love Story!! clone. Love of Kill is unlike any other shojo series in recent years, with its main characters being young adults with dangerous jobs and James Bond-style action and intrigue in an unnamed European urban setting. Shojo fans will love the bizarre but growing chemistry between Chateau and Ryang-ha, and in true shojo style, Ryang-ha is mysterious, handsome and confident, which may call a certain Usui Takumi to mind.
Then again, Love of Kill feels like a seinen series with its main characters' age and the action, and the series may also feel like a josei, given the female lead, emphasis on relationships and once again, the main characters' ages. This isn't a conventional high school romance -- Love of Kill delicately blends three demographics into one in its debut episode, and fans are sure to get plenty more in future installments. This may be Love of Kill's greatest strength.
Love Of Kill Casts A Wide Net For Viewership
Love of Kill's debut episode finely balances three different anime demographics so it can appeal to many diverse viewers, and fortunately, Love of Kill isn't the only anime to do this. Many mainstream anime series are cleanly pigeonholed into one of the four main anime demographics, such as My Hero Academia being a shonen staple and Sailor Moon being unapologetically shojo, but more and more series are experimenting with these boundaries, create an experience that anyone can enjoy with a rich variety of elements in a single story. Not all anime need to do this, but those that do can show just how universally appealing anime can be, refreshing worn-out ideas and conventions quickly with unexpected combinations of storytelling elements.
Love of Kill does this by creating an action-packed romance. In a similar vein, Kaguya-sama brings together the seinen and shojo crowds in one slick package, with some room for shonen fans too. That series is a seinen anime with many elements of shojo and even a high school shonen series like Horimiya, and that, combined with stellar characters and clever battles of wits, make Kaguya-sama a broadly appealing anime to watch. Meanwhile, there's also Laid-Back Camp, an "edutainment" anime that's categorized as seinen but with plenty for shojo fans to like, and Horimiya and Komi Can't Communicate are both shojo-style shonen high school anime series with plenty of diverse fans.
Thus, Love of Kill joins an important and intriguing trend in anime, where rigid demographic divides become more porous so that the anime industry can benefit from some cross-pollination, creating countless new series that couldn't easily exist with rigid definitions of shonen, shojo, seinen and josei. Those four demographics are distinct for a reason, but they can also meet at the borders and trade ideas, and broadly-appealing series like Love of Kill and Kaguya-sama are the result. This can also expand anime's appeal to non-anime fans, who will want a series that reminds them of genre-mixing movies and TV shows. Perhaps a Western romance fan won't like Maid-Sama!, but they could find plenty to like with Love of Kill or Kaguya-sama.