# Scum's Wish (2017)

> Two popular high schoolers pretend to be a couple while secretly pining for others, using each other to ease their loneliness.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/60711

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 12
- Episode runtime: 23 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: animation, drama, romance
- Network: Fuji TV, Iwate Menkoi Television, Sakuranbo TV
- Cast: Chika Anzai, Nobunaga Shimazaki, Haruka Tomatsu, Shiori Izawa, Kenji Nojima, Aki Toyosaki, Aya Hisakawa, Juri Kimura
- TMDB rating: 6.7/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6197170/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: none
- Tone: melancholic, bleak, intimate, uncomfortable, wistful

## What critics say

Audiences rate the series as mixed, valuing its frank portrayal of loneliness and unrequited love while finding its bleak tone and uneven payoff divisive.

## Synopsis

Scum's Wish (2017) is a Japanese animated romance drama series created for Fuji TV, adapted from a manga and produced by the studio Lerche. Seventeen-year-old Mugi Awaya and Hanabi Yasuraoka look like the perfect high school couple, but their relationship is a private arrangement built on loneliness. Each is hopelessly in love with someone out of reach: Mugi with Akane Minagawa (voiced by Aki Toyosaki), a young teacher who once tutored him at home, and Hanabi with a family friend who is also a teacher. Voiced by Nobunaga Shimazaki as Mugi and Chika Anzai as Hanabi, the story unfolds across a single twelve-episode run of roughly twenty-three minutes each, following their secret physical closeness and the grief they carry. The engine is the tension between the performance they keep up for classmates and the emptiness they share in private. Set in a contemporary Japanese high school, the series is psychological and intimate, with a melancholic, uncomfortable register that foregrounds yearning over comfort. Fans of Your Lie in April and Oregairu will find resonance in its portrait of adolescent heartache and the cost of unreturned feelings.

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