Ah! My Goddess

You can call it a harem anime if you like - it IS about a random dude who lives with an ever-expanding pool of cute girls who are continually drawn into orbit around his otherwise ho-hum life - but at its core, Ah! My Goddess is a quirky rom-com about two shy little turtledoves surrounded by an army of Wacky Roommates cheering them on to just fucking kiss already.

This show is sweet enough to drizzle onto your pancakes for breakfast.

It starts out simple enough. A happy-go-luckless dude (Keiichi) one day accidentally wrong number dials a hotline up in heaven (as you do) and by a slip of the tongue, casually sweet talks a goddess (Belldandy) into contractually staying with him on earth forever. They move in together and live a modest life full of hiding Belldandy's divine powers and rebuilding motorcycles for the local auto club as a means of making it through college.

Keiichi on his way to steal yo girl.

Meanwhile, slowly but surely, Belldandy's absence from heaven brings all of her goddess friends (and enemies!) looking for her, and they decide to stick around, not because there's work to be done on earth or anything important like that, but mostly just to see if she and Keiichi will ever overcome their mutual shyness and get together or not! It's not a particularly plot heavy show, and it's fueled not by the actual events that befall our star-crossed lovers, but by the characters themselves and the ironically down-to-earth ways they interact with each other.

Even goddesses can be easily distracted.

What makes the show so fun is the fact that the stakes are ultimately low (ish), but for a college student ever teetering on the brink of financial ruin, even the slightest upset might as well be the end of the world. It's a show about making big moments out of small moments, often in the most comical ways possible.

Mara is the single biggest threat in the entire show, just look at how evil she is.

Okay, actually I kinda lied. Listen. When people talk about anime having absurd and over-the-top plots, they tend to focus on BIG things. They pull out their favorite action shounen series and focus on how extreme the fights are, how much shit the characters have to go through to achieve their goals, how ruthless the immortal time-stopping vampire bodybuilder sexyman is in his conquest to kill every spawn of the cursed bloodline he's been fated to fight since forever. For most people, "over-the-top" starts with fighting and yelling and power levels. And while that's not *incorrect*, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking other genres (shoujo and slice of life, for example) are just "normal" and not weird at all by comparison. It becomes super easy to overlook how utterly buck wild the plot of any shoujo series can be when you actually spell it out.

That's what you get for sitting too close the TV when you watch.

Over the course of its 50+ episodes, Ah! My Goddess evolves from a simple college dramedy with an angelic twist to a story about Heaven and Hell fighting over control of the earth because too many goddesses and demons are just hanging out there now. With too few goddesses to oversee its day-to-day operations, the call center that is Heaven starts glitching out and causing random chaos localized around Keichii and Belldandy. One demon acquires the means to bring about the destruction of all humans by summoning the wolf Fenrir (yes, THAT Fenrir) to consume the planet, but it turns out Fenrir functions like a personified computer program, and through a bit of trickery and carefully worded nonsense, ends up sealed inside a fucking floppy disk and erased with a magnet. All so our heroes can get back to the good old rom-com shenanigans.

You cannot tell me that's not a completely over-the-top plot!

Skuld's version of "Don't Copy That Floppy" focuses on something more important than software piracy: preventing Armageddon.

Anyway, Ah! My Goddess really is the quintessential slice of life romance anime that embodies dozens of classic tropes still used to this very day. It's the type of show that I was strongarm encouraged to AVOID growing up - I can still hear my dad saying shit like "That’s a GIRL show, what are you watching THAT for?" - and I regret waiting so long to actually sit down and form my own opinions on it. It's a very slow-paced show with plenty of twenty-something drama, but it's got a genuine heartfelt emotional core that shines through its characters, even as the show gets wackier and weirder the longer it goes. It probably would have resonated with me more back when I was a teenager vs when I finally watched it in my late 30s, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless.

As far as recommendations go, if you're in it for the rom-com humor and wacky playfulness of it, you'll almost definitely enjoy Ranma ½. For harem shenanigans with a little more boobage, you could also try the similarly-themed Girls Bravo or Sekirei. I wish I had something non-anime to recommend here, but American productions are basically allergic to cartoons about women, much less cartoons about harems, and even less cartoons featuring "religious" themes like angels and demons and heavenly call centers. If I eventually think of one, I'll add it here in the future!

Don't miss the special guest appearance by The Who!