It’s not that BL ever went anywhere. It may have always existed in some capacity. But good BL is hard to find, at least when seen through the lens of my worldview, which seeks to avoid issues like homophobia, stereotypes and fetishization. I used to watch and enjoy a lot of very trashy, problematic BL/yaoi anime. These days, I either won’t touch that stuff or at best find it difficult to enjoy anymore. (For example, I tried to re-watch Junjou Romantica (2008) and couldn’t get into it.)

Fortunately, not all BL is full of toxic couples and sexual assault. Things have improved in the world of BL and yaoi anime since the early 2000s. Thanks to a few recent goodies like Given (2019) and Sasaki and Miyano (2022) there is definitely hope for the genre. But it feels like we haven’t had a truly promising BL for a few years. Then along came Twilight Out of Focus in 2024 and things seem hopeful to me again. This brief review will go over some of the reasons why this new BL anime is so awesome. Twilight Out of Focus is a golden trumpet of a show, proudly proclaiming, “BL is Back!”

Spoiler Note: Spoilers are contained to the Character and Personal Enjoyment sections

1. Story
2. Visuals
3. Audio
4. Characters
5. Personal Enjoyment
6. Overall Score

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Story

Score: 7/10

The story is divided into three arcs of several episodes each. The three arcs follow the romances of three couples. First, we have Mao Tsuchiya, a quiet student at an all-male boarding school who falls in love with his cool roommate, Hisashi Ohtomo. For the second couple, we focus on the dramatic theater kids Giichi Ichikawa and Jin Kikuchihara, who go from rivals to lovers. Third and finally, there’s the enthusiastic femboy Shion Yoshino and the terse, aloof senior Rei Inaba, who form an unexpected couple. Each pair is interesting and entertaining in its own way. The final episode revisits each couple and ends with Mao and Hisashi, forming a neat narrative circle.

In school romance anime, you don’t expect stellar storytelling. There’s not that much to work with compared to an adventure story or something with high-stakes action. Still, for what it is – a drama focused on highschoolers – the story aspect was more than adequate. The pacing was good. There were interesting themes woven into the story, including new beginnings, coming of age, and rethinking assumptions. It’s a hopeful, uplifting story. There are a few darker elements, but they are not the focus, nor are they glorified like in some shows. For example, Hisashi’s first love was a mess, but the arc with him and Mao is about moving on to a new life that’s healthier and hopeful.

The lack of toxic and inappropriate relationships was so refreshing after my history of shows like Junjou Romantica. That plus the hopeful themes and classic romantic drama atmosphere makes me want to rate the story category very highly. However, due to the somewhat boring setting and the formulaic way that the arcs may feel, I won’t give the story category a great score. It certainly wasn’t bad, though. 7/10 feels most fair to me.

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Visuals

Score: 8/10

I never have as much to say about visuals because I don’t know much about animation and I’m bad at focusing on the details of visual stimuli in general. But the visuals in Twilight Out of Focus were always highly enjoyable. Everything looks so pretty and polished. Like in most drama anime, there is not a lot of movement. There doesn’t need to be if it isn’t an action show. Watching Twilight Out of Focus is like reading a manga in full color. The shots are mostly still, detailed and beautiful. The colors are rich but not too striking, which works well for a drama. The backgrounds and lighting were also excellent from what I can recall. You can get a basic idea of the visuals from this clip.

As you can see from the clip, heavy blush for the characters’ faces is prominent in this anime. So are the sparkles, bubbles, colorful backgrounds, and floating patterns. It’s a bit like Sasaki and Miyano in that regard. However, I think Twilight Out of Focus is slightly more realistic and detailed by comparison. The character designs are not the most original, but in a drama anime, things like expressions and voices matter much more than colorful, memorable outfits or hair. And in this anime, the expressions are amazing. As far as style, the boys appear surprisingly mature rather than skinny and cute, which struck me as unusual. For example, based on normal anime looks, I would think Hisashi was in his twenties, but he’s in highschool! Anyway, I ended up liking the art-style and character designs a lot.

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Audio

Score: 9/10

The only reason I didn’t give a 10 for audio is that the opening song really isn’t that great. It’s called “Crank Up” by Ikusaburo Yamazaki. It’s not my style in terms of sound and I think it’s too soft and weak for an opening. The show would have done better switching the opening and ending songs, in my opinion. Small complaints aside, the audio for Twilight Out of Focus was astounding. There are two main reasons why I think so: the ending song and the voice-acting. As for the instrumental music, it didn’t leave much of a mark on my memory, but I would need to listen to the OST to have a more solid opinion. (As of Feb ’26, the OST cannot be found on YouTube). The composer for Twilight Out of Focus was Satoshi Houno, who also wrote the music for Aggressive Retsuko (2018).

The amazing ending song is “Unchain x Unchain” by Amber’s. I cannot say enough how much I enjoy this song. It’s in all my YouTube anime playlists and I have learned to sing along to lyric videos. (I don’t link lyric videos anymore because YouTube tends to take them down.) This upbeat song would best into the genres of J-pop and alternative rock. It also reminds me of Alanis Morisette in terms of vocal style, which is a big plus, as I’ve loved Alanis’ music for many years. The lyrics are about the anxieties and thrills of being in love with a new person. The song encourages expressing one’s love loudly and breaking free from fears and rules. It makes sense for queer love stories especially. In other words, it’s about unchaining one’s love and passion.

Besides that song, the other great audio aspect was the voice-acting. Everyone performed well from what I could tell and there were several permances in particular that I liked. For example, take Souma Saitou, voice of Shion. He was also the voice of Miyano in Sasaki and Miyano. In addition, I was impressed with Masamoto Nakazawa, who played Giichi Ichikawa. His passion in the role was commendable. I don’t know his voice very well yet, but he also played Haruki in Given. I hope to hear him in more roles soon. Recently, I’ve enjoyed hearing Takuya Eguchi in Spy x Family, where he voices Loid Forger. In Twilight Out Of Focus, he plays Rei Inaba. His deep, low voice works really well for the part.

The last two voice actors I’ll mention are Makoto Furukawa (voice of Jin Kikuchihara) and Yoshitsugu Matsuoka (voice of Mao Tsuchiya). Both are very well-known, very experienced seiyuus who can act extremely well. Both have had a plethora of roles since the 2010’s. Furukawa has a deep, slightly nasal voice that’s hard to miss. He’s most famous for playing Saitama in One Punch Man, so he can also do lighter, more comedic voices. It was great to hear him playing the dramatic theater boy, Jin. Matsuoka has a much more boyish voice with distinct main-character energy. Again, his roles are numerous, but I know him best as Kirito from Sword Art Online. As Mao, he played a quiet, less charismatic character than usual, but he did a fantastic job. Mao’s voice-over narrations and internal monologues always sound beautiful and insightful.

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Characters

Score: 8/10

The character category was another example of this anime’s strengths. In general, the characters are well-developed, engaging, and diverse. It’s rare that I genuinely like so many characters in a BL anime. Though the characters are terrific, it’s hard for me to explain more unless I provide examples, which means revealing character information. Therefore, if you don’t want spoilers, just skip the remainder of this section.

Hisashi might be the most popular character, and with good reason. He’s interesting and charming with a rebellious “delinquent” side. (He’s also considered hot and fashionable.) Hisashi’s character arc is about moving on from the traumatic past into a better life. When he was even younger, Hisashi was preyed on by a pedophilic teacher, who became his “first love.” They had an intense sexual relationship for a while until finally the predator broke it off – probably to save his own skin. After Hisashi called him out as a pedophile, the teacher struck him in the face. That was their breakup. Hisashi clearly has his work cut out for him to process all this darkness and emotional trauma. We see him begin to do so in his new relationship with Mao. Despite what he’s working through, Hisashi is always kind and patient with Mao, and puts on a strong, smiling face at school. He’s like a slightly more rugged prince character with a dark past.

My favorite character is probably Mao because he’s so introverted, romantic and thoughtful. He and Hisashi both have very gentle hearts. I also think filming is an interesting profession/hobby, and we don’t see many characters in anime that pursue it. Additionally, I loved Rei – the quietest and smartest of the main cast. Unlike Hisashi, Rei can be quite inconsiderate, and struggles with expressing and processing emotions normally. (I also love his character design.) Shion was adorable, if a little shallow and selfish at first. He and Rei both went through a lot of personal growth in their arc.

Jin was a great addition as an extraverted character and a great actor. Despite being wildly popular at present, he didn’t hit his stride socially until highschool – largely because of the social stigma of having childhood obesity. That dimension certainly added depth and vulnerability to Jin, though I wish the discussion of the topic had been a little more detailed. Last but not least, there’s Giichi Ichikawa, who I loved right away for his loud passion and creativity. Though he’s a “theater kid”, too, Giichi is much more strict, orderly, and thorough than Jin. In a way, Jin is chaos and Giichi is order. I loved how their fierce rivalry became a romance. As you can see, the characters were excellent.

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Personal Enjoyment

Score: 7/10

For the most part, I loved Twilight Out of Focus. The sparkling visuals, outstanding audio, entertaining character writing, and more contributed to my high opinion. Thanks to this anime, I feel like BL is back and doing great. However, I wouldn’t rate my personal enjoyment higher than 7/10 because of two main “issues.” (I say issues in quotes because it’s not really the show’s fault that I feel this way.)

The first problem is that I am a grown adult and it makes me uncomfortable when characters who are minors are sexualized. I know it’s just fiction, of course, but it still often gives me the ick. I would have been fine without the sexual scenes. However, I don’t think the show necessarily did anything wrong by just including the fact that some highschoolers have sex. That’s just realistic. One could also say the sex scenes were positive because they normalize relations between people of the same gender. As sex scenes go, they were tame and vague – though still spicier than what you’d see in the average anime for sure. If you want to age up the characters in your head and imagine steamy things, that’s your right. Personally, I didn’t enjoy the sexual parts just due to the ages of the characters.

The second “issue” was that I was slightly bored by the setting or by the fact that the end result of each arc – the two main boys becoming a couple – was easily predictable. But I have ADHD, and it’s normal for any non-thriller anime to bore me at a few points. The predictability isn’t really something to complain about, either, since the main selling point of the show is that these boys form couples. Of course, a show needs to deliver what it advertised. To wrap things up, I may have a few personal hangups, but let me restate that Twilight Out of Focus is an amazing BL anime overall – especially compared to the trashy, rapey shows of the 2000s.

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Overall Score

7.8 out of 10.0 Pretty Gay Boys

The overall score is simply the average or mean of the scores for the five categories we went over before. Anime in the 7s range is “good” and anime in the 8s range is “excellent.” Twilight Out of Focus is right on the border by my metric and can be considered an 8/10 anime. I think it definitely deserves that much. The current score for this show on MAL is 7.47 (as of January 30th, 2026), which strikes me as much too low. Then again, with all the homophobes in the anime community, maybe even this rating is a victory. If you watched Twilight Out of Focus, let me know your thoughts in the comments. For me, it was a great show that made me excited and hopeful about the BL/shounen ai genre.

~Thanks for Reading~

Written by 7Mononoke at Anime Rants

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