The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl

I am just so tired of anime where a girl is strong and gets mocked mercilessly for being a “gorilla!” I want more series where it's seen as a good thing worth being proud of, and not a mark of being undateable. The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl is just advancing misogynistic stereotypes by…

Huh? What do you mean that she's not the butt of a joke?

When I realized wasn't going to be all about making jokes at the heroine Sophia Reeler's expense, the show instantly became much more interesting. It's true, Sophia doesn't want to be strong, but she doesn't want a blessing that would put her in the spotlight. It's kind of the opposite of all those male-oriented series where the protagonist wants to be an adventurer but receives a disappointingly crappy power, only to figure out a way to still be powerful and get everything they wanted. Sophia finds herself thrust into a life she never asked for, recruited to the Royal Knights due to her rare blessing that grants her all the physical abilities of a gorilla, including super-strength and speed. Did you know gorillas can run up to 40 km/h? I didn't! Her three love interests, fellow junior knights, are presumably charmed and impressed by her strength instead of turned off as well. In this house, we love men who are attracted to strong women instead of trying to push them down!

Except…

There's no joke at Sophia's expense, right? But they're not replaced with any other kind of humor, other than occasional gags about the gorilla god taking control of Sophia. And a reference to her suddenly craving bananas, which did manage to get a chuckle from me. Likewise, Sophia is clear about the things she'd prefer to avoid, but there's no sense of what she desires for herself and what she's losing by becoming a knight. The opening theme song makes a lot of promises about a budding romance between Sophia and Louis, but their interactions are as bland as can be.

I like the ideas behind The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl in theory, but in practice, there are too many pieces missing, too many places where there's a blank void in place of personality. It's a shame, because I doubt we'll see anyone else take a shoujo-oriented stab at this idea anytime soon.

Thanks to certain past fantasy anime centered around gorillas, I find myself terrified whenever another comes into being. So to say that The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl was a welcome surprise would be an understatement.

Basically, this anime is about a girl who is already an outcast in school (due to her being a countryside noble) who gets the blessing of an animal god that makes her even more of an outcast. While many girls get the beauty of a peacock or wings of a bird that allow them to fly, Sofia gets the incredibly unlady-like powers of a gorilla. But even though her new powers make her utterly mortified, they also make her incredibly attractive to the royal knights who would do just about anything to add a person with super strength and speed to their ranks.

What we get from this is the story of an outcast finding the place she belongs and is valued somewhere she never expected. The knights in training she encounters are impressed by her kindness as much as her powers and the attention she receives is universally positive. And the comedy centered around her lack of control regarding her powers is worth a laugh or two.

I also enjoyed the gorilla facts we get throughout the episode as they give us something we rarely get in anime with superpowers: concrete numbers. She is seven times as strong as a normal human and can run at 40 kph. This means we know her limits going in—can figure out when she is in danger and when she isn't—which is a key part of building narrative tension.

All in all, this anime is a bit rough around the edges on the animation front and won't blow your socks off with either the story or humor. However, everything still manages to come together to form a rather enjoyable package. It's certainly better than average and I'll probably keep up with it this season.

Anime gorillas and I have a…complicated and traumatic history. Thankfully, unlike that other show, The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl is not a wretched, spiteful, laughter-destroying entropy machine ripped straight out of the bowels of hell. Instead, it's a goofy romantic fantasy where our heroine, Sophia, is puzzled to discover that she has earned the blessing of the gorilla god, from all of the possible animal options. On top of that, she's got to deal with the ins-and-outs of aristocratic academic life (and she doesn't even have an electric guitar to wail on and mend her woes). How is a girl supposed to do that while also learning how to manage her freakish new gorilla-strength?

Also, the new order of knights she's been scouted into is full of hunky boys that all represent the different animal gods, and they'll all undoubtedly fall in love with her. Naturally. So far as the new anime we've covered so far for Preview Guide are concerned, it is The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl that has been the hardest to write about, for some reason. For every other show, my thoughts and opinions have formed fairly quickly and clearly as I've gotten through their premieres, and getting those takes down on to paper has been refreshingly straightforward, this spring. With The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl girl, though, I just don't know what else I can say, other than “It's fine!” That was word that consumed my thoughts through the entire premiere:

“This Sophia girl is a fine protagonist.”

“These are some perfectly fine jokes about freakish gorilla strength.”

“This animation is perfectly fine.”

“The world-building for this fantasy setting is fine enough to move the plot forward.”

“The hunky anime boys surrounding Sophia sure are fine…but, you know, in the sense that they're mediocre, not that they're hot. Wait a minute, why I am clarifying things for my own inner monologue? I obviously would know what I mean when I'm talking to myself! This is starting to get ridicu- oh, look, Sophia met another boy. He's alright, I guess.”

That's…yeah, that's pretty much all I've got! This here is the very definition of an anime that wants to be a middle-of-the-road rom-com that can get you through some thirty-odd minutes of your weekend, and it accomplishes exactly that, and nothing more. Given that the season is so stacked with great romance and great comedy, though, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl as anything other than an emergency understudy to be used as a replacement for if any of the season's better shows get delayed for some reason.

Sometimes a show doesn't need to be all that spectacular to be entertaining, and that's how I feel about The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl. It's not all that different from any other reverse harem fantasy fare, unless you count the gorilla god. It even opens in a remarkably similar way to Cinderella Gray, with black-on-brown drawings of some sort of in-world historic information. In this case, it's that animal gods choose people to bless in a run-of-the-mill ceremony, and whatever god chooses you determines your special abilities. So when unassuming Sophia ends up being the first person blessed by the gorilla god in fifty years, that means that her life plans are abruptly derailed.

Not that she seems to have had many plans, or much personality prior to being selected. She does seem ambivalent about earning her M.R.S. degree at the end of her schooling, like so many of her peers are planning, but she also was in no way expecting to be scouted by the Royal Knights – or to be the only girl to be scouted pretty much ever. All Sophia knows is that she doesn't want that kind of attention, so she plans to fail the junior knight exams and go crave bananas somewhere out of the way.

As you might have guessed, that's not going to happen. It looks like she has little-to-no control over when her gorilla powers kick in, and the episode shows them as being somehow instinctive – the cute boy who seems to be the chosen of the golden retriever god is falling, so she grabs him in her meaty fist and then gets them both to the ground. She's running, so she naturally falls into a ground-eating lope. It's like the god is now dictating how her body works, and if she's not all that bemused by it, it certainly looks at least a little awkward to me – and it seems like she may not be ing what's happening because she's so busy thinking about how to fail an exam I'm 90% sure she's already aced.

Along with the puppy boy, there seems to be a cat boy and the true romantic interest circling around her. We don't get any hints as to what Louis' god is (unless he's also Sir Scarrel and blessed by the squirrel god), but he's the guy we see the most of, primarily in the opening theme, which makes them look like a set pair. Nothing looks remarkable except how much longer Sophia's hair is in the ending theme, and noticeable animation shortcuts are taken throughout the episode. But this is still a mild, entertaining bit of fluff, and I think it could be fun to see where it goes.