Video Girl AI is a romance that, while not explicitly featuring otaku, is in some sense the classic otaku fantasy, being only a slight dramatization of the otaku reality for many. As another anime featuring cute girls in love with the hapless protagonists, we watch it and dream about being that straightforward and lovable loser who could attract the girls on screen, preferably plucking them right through the screen without having to leave our couch where everything is comfortable and the world is kind. This feels like a lot to ask, but Video Girl AI tells exactly that story; Moteuchi Youta may not be an otaku like us, even as the feisty but caring anime girl Ai emerges from his TV to help mend his broken heart and find him his true love in the world, but the kindness beneath his awkwardness and the will to move forward beneath the tears of rejection are the classic traits we grab onto and see in ourselves. And if Ai could make the jump into his bedroom from the broken VCR by his bedside, then maybe the next time she, or one of the hundreds of other selfless characters that pass through our screens, could make one more jump to us.
Of course projecting onto Youta takes a few jumps ourselves. It's a little too self-congratulatory to imagine ourselves as the perfectly kind yet perfectly misunderstood type, an endless source of kindness, attention, and self-sacrifice for anyone willing to move past our awkwardness and get to know the real us. The smart choice of Video Girl AI then is to write these traits in a way that's familiar to most of us; Youta is the confidant who lends an ear to girls frustrated with romance, even if that means suppressing his own crush Moemi and going home to cry alone in an empty apartment. He's the type to try and make romance happen between his best friend and Moemi because that's what she wants, despite some fairly clear evidence that that friend has zero interest in her. He's the type to wish that his friend's feelings were different so he could reciprocate her love, even though deep down he'd rather her feelings were the ones that were different.
And since even the confidants need someone to confide in, the presence of Ai, who makes jokes about coming on to him and throws fits until he takes her out on dates but who also gives him a friend who knows his suppressed feelings and a warm body to cry against, is the support he needs to take his own happiness into account as well. For all her jokes it's said that a Video Girl like her can't fall in love, and as a sign of devotion to Moemi the thought of loving Ai never seems to cross Youta's mind either. She exists in this weird space we see a lot in anime throughout the years, where she is supposed to be sexless to him as a friend and support in his love life, but despite that it's absolutely imperative that she be female, whether it be as a backup or to reassure us that Youta is popular with women, just unlucky with the one he fell in love with. Often her character would be a childhood friend or a girl after her own love, but in being a Video Girl Ai can be solely devoted to Youta's needs without a life of her own, with an adorably cute visual design and classic tsundere personality but with no risk of developing a love life with Youta or, more importantly, anyone else.
For anyone who started feeling suspicious sometime in the last paragraph, that the titular girl with the most characterization and attention of anyone outside Youta could really go the whole show without the writers trying to push her inner feelings towards Youta despite her purpose, that tension is the lifeblood of this kind of romance. It would be just as wrong to spoil the development of Youta and Ai's friendship as it would be to spoil the future of Youta and Moemi. Then again I would imagine that the draw for most people nowadays would be either in the simple pleasures of watching a cute predictable romance or in the street credit of watching an otaku classic created by Tiger & Bunny's artist Katsura Masakazu and directed by Nishikubo Mizuho of cult works like Heart Cocktail Again, Machikado no Marchen, and more recently Giovanni's Island. The emotions at play in the first episode are raw and deserve attention, but as each episode starts to tread a more familiar path I found myself gravitating more towards the joy of watching 90's cell art and subtly crazy hair designs than the story, with the romance forming a comfortable backdrop.
Actually in that regard I'm fine with the romance and story treading familiar ground. Of course at the time it was being produced Video Girl AI couldn't be “vintage”, but nowadays it captures the baseline feeling of what it was like to watch the 90's romance OVA pretty succinctly, from the Youta and Ai characters to the rough outlines and designs, with a twist of sci-fi and the classic catchy opening Ureshii Namida. It's a work that brings to mind the image of an otaku in the 90's surrounded by VHS tapes as new high school OVAs came flying from every corner of the industry every year, each one being put up for debate in the local anime circles based on their story, design, and characters. And besides having VHS tapes itself to mark it as part of that time, imagining a girl springing to life from the screen of a blocky TV to give us shut-ins the warmth and attention we deserve distills that image further, setting the stage for the otaku-centric romance stories of the early 2000s in as straightforward a way as possible.