Behind the "mwah, mama" cuteness, the bodies are quietly disappearing
I just started watching "Kimi ga Shinu made Koi wo Shitai" (English title: "I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day").
At first I took it for a straightforward yuri anime, the kind where the girls sit very close together. Mimi kisses Shiina, and I'm doing my usual "mwah" and "mama" bit at the screen, and then the anime itself goes and says "mwah" and "mama..." right back at me.
We were in perfect sync, lol. If anyone clipped that, it would look incredibly cringe.
But this doesn't look like a show you can get through by only watching the sweet scenes.
Everything's cute, except how death is handled
It's set in a school that raises orphans to be weapons of war.
The main character, Shiina, is 14. She trains in magic meant for killing people, but she doesn't actually want to go to war, and she can't make peace with hurting anyone. Then she meets Mimi, a girl known as the immortal secret weapon.
The setup alone is heavy enough from the start.
What's even creepier is that the dead leave no bodies. They just vanish.
Maybe that's just a way to dodge showing gore on screen. But in this world nobody has the time to mourn, and people dying is processed like routine office work. With the bodies gone, it looks as if the dead are erased from the world, physically and socially.
Meanwhile, Mimi doesn't die.
"Ordinary kids die and disappear" versus "only Mimi breaks and comes back." The moment that gap gets tied to a love story, there's no way this ends peacefully.
The source is a yuri manga by Aono Nachi
The original is a manga by Aono Nachi, serialized in "Comic Yuri Hime" (a yuri manga magazine published by Ichijinsha).
It isn't based on a novel. It's a story about girls raised as weapons of war, about "life, death and love," and as of July 16, 2026 volume 9 is out. The serialization is still running, and the story isn't finished.
That means the anime isn't "a finished manga adapted all the way to the end," either.
With a 1-cour run (one TV season of about 12 episodes), choosing where to stop matters a great deal. It's entirely possible they'll end it partway through the manga, at the point where the emotions hit hardest.
And the person in charge of that structure is Jukki Hanada.
Jukki Hanada, the "payoff machine" for the second half
Jukki Hanada handles series composition and screenplay.
He also worked on "A Place Further Than the Universe" (Uchuu yori mo Tooi Basho), "Sound! Euphonium" (Hibike! Euphonium) and "Steins;Gate," all of which I love. The way "Love Live!" built up the hype around "Snow halation" (one of its best-known songs) comes from the same school of writing.
What makes Hanada's work strong isn't that he suddenly throws in a huge incident to make you cry.
In the first half he piles up everyday life, relationships, promises and offhand words. You come to love the characters, and you can relax into their ordinary atmosphere. Then in the second half he changes the meaning of things and lines that have been on screen all along, and the emotion pays off all at once.
In "A Place Further Than the Universe," it's the emails Shirase kept sending to her mother.
It's not just a story about "losing her mother." The time when those emails went unanswered, the time she couldn't give up, the whole life of the person who kept sending them, all of it turns real at once in the form of a count of unread emails.
In "Steins;Gate," he spends the first half building up the silly daily life with the lab members before dropping us into the hell of watching Mayuri die over and over.
So if you want a rough, careless summary, Jukki Hanada is "the guy who killed Mayuri for episodes on end."
To be accurate, of course, Mayuri dying again and again was already in the original game. What Hanada designed was where to place that in the TV anime and how many episodes it takes to corner Okabe (the protagonist) and the viewers.
What's the difference between "series composition" and "screenplay"?
Series composition is the person who designs the whole work.
For a 12-episode show, that person decides where the two leads grow closer, in which episode the rules of the world are revealed, which foreshadowing gets planted first, where the emotions explode, and how much of the source material to use.
The screenplay is the person who builds the actual scenes of each episode.
They write who says what, in what order things happen, where a scene cuts, and what the last shot is before the next episode.
On "Kimi ga Shinu made Koi wo Shitai," Hanada is credited for both series composition and screenplay, and he wrote episode 2 himself.
In other words, while designing the emotional curve of the whole series, he's also directly involved in the concrete details of each episode, at least some of them.
Bodies that disappear. An immortal girl. A kiss that closes the distance. Conversations about pain.
All of these elements, planted from the very start, will likely take on a different meaning in the second half.
And the theme song is by ReoNa
The opening theme is "Amore" by ReoNa.
Even if you haven't heard her in a while, you recognize her right away: that breathy, quiet way of singing, like she's carrying a hidden wound.
Putting ReoNa on a story about war, death, immortality and love between girls tells me the production side doesn't plan to sell this as just a cheerful yuri anime.
It might sound like a sweet love song, but in this story that "love" is tied directly to survival and loss.
Maybe this isn't a "cute yuri," but a story about "someone you can't bear to lose"
Shiina doesn't start out with any strong hope for living.
She doesn't want to go to war. She doesn't want to hurt anyone. She can't get used to how everyone around her is so used to death. But after meeting Mimi and falling for someone, she begins to feel, for the first time, "I don't want to lose this time."
It looks like a story about being saved by love.
At the same time, it also looks like a story where learning to love makes death scarier than before.
Mimi, who doesn't die, and Shiina, who does.
Mimi, who comes back from the battlefield, and Shiina, who may someday grow up.
The more cute everyday moments they stack up, the more it will hurt when those moments get destroyed.
Hanada is especially good at exactly this: build it up, break it, and then, after the break, turn even the earlier ordinary scenes into something that makes you cry.
We're only in the early episodes, and the ominous pieces are already falling into place.
I was supposed to be screaming "mwah, mama..." along with the anime and laughing about it, and yet here I am, looking up how the bodies disappear and what the screenwriter has done before.
This one could become a masterpiece.
At the very least, it doesn't look like it's going to let me walk away unscathed.
Note: the information about the work is as of July 16, 2026.
Main sources checked: the official site of the TV anime "Kimi ga Shinu made Koi wo Shitai," Ichijinsha's official page for "Comic Yuri Hime," the official site of "A Place Further Than the Universe," and the official site of "Sound! Euphonium."
