One day Hiyori is fly fishing at the shore line when she runs into a strange girl who thinks it’s appropriate to try and swim in the ocean in March. Desperate to stop her, Hiyori casts her fishing line at her to reel her back in and that how she meets her new step sister, Koharu.
It’s a time honoured setup, having your protagonist’s parent remarry to get a new sibling they already have feelings about. “Oh no, the girl I have a crush on turns out to be my new stepsister“! It’s almost a romcom subgenre at this point, a way to get a little bit of that delicious incest in your anime without having to deal with the messiness and taboo of actual incest, cf. Summer 2022’s My Stepmom’s Daughter Is My Ex. Here, it’s used much more innocently, with Hiyori and Koharu learning to live together as sisters, a purely platonic love. What I always wonder with this setup is how realistic it is. Do people in Japan really remarry without involving their children until then? Call me naive, but I’d expect that if you got into any serious relationship as a parent, you’d want your children to be involved long before you ever thought of marriage. Especially in a situation like that of Hiyori and Koharu, both of whom lost a parent. Is this something that happens in real life Japan as well or is this just an anime convenience?
Realistic or not, this is Slow Loop‘s premisse: Hiyori lost her father through illness, Koharu lost her mother and younger brother in an accident, their parents met and decided to remarry and now they learn to live together as sisters, mostly through the power of fly fishing. Hiyori learned it from her late father and has kept it up ever since, partially as a way of remembering him. Koharu, coming from an inland part of Japan has never fished at all but is immediately captured by it. Much of the series therefore is like your typical hobby anime, with the girls learning different ways of fly fishing, with plenty of exposition on the technical aspects of it along the way. As such it’s not dissimilar to e.g Houkago Teibou Nisshi, another cute girls go fishing show, but for that underlying current of grief and remembrance that pops up occassionally.
For the most part however this is a show about fly fishing, with Hiyori teaching Koharu how to fish while she in turn turns out to be quite good at cooking the fish. They’re joined in this by Hiyori’s childhood friend Koi, who’s slightly jealous of Koharu. Koi’s dad was friends with Hiyori’s and an even greater fishing fanatic than him, to the point of not being present at the birth of his daughter, to the latters great annoyance. Nevertheless, she’s just as interested in the sport, not just working in her parents fishing shop, but also going fishing with Hiyori and Koharu. She’s usually the person explaining the technical details of fly fishing to them as well. She’s a great character, somewhat protective of Hiyori but also sharp enough to notice it when Hiyori is fussing too much over Koharu.
Rounding off the main cast of fishing loving girls are the sisters Ichika and Futaba, the former being a college aged (semi) professional fisher with her own boat and the later being in elementary school. Ichika is the cool, tanned outdoorsy type with a bit of a lecherous side to her and an equally cool hunting (girl)friend. Futaba meanwhile is worried that fishing isn’t girl like and that her best friend would hate her if she knew she liked fishing. In all the cast is diverse enough that the various fishing adventures they go on are never boring even if you like me lack much interest in it. What also should be mentioned is the presence of Hiyori, Koharu and Koi’s parents and their relationships with them, which does play a much more important part in the series than usual. A hobby anime like this usually doesn’t feature parents at all, but the evolving relationship between the main three and their respective parents is a large part of what makes this show stand out.
In all this was a mellow little slice of moe anime, something to watch to unwind after work. The animation was decent, fluid where it needed to be. As befitting a series with large parts set in the more rural parts of Japan, the background were gorgeous. I did have to get used to the character styling at first, somewhat different from your usual cute girls anime, but it works. Recommended if you like easy going series with not too much plot but which focus on characters by way of their hobbies.