YMMV / The Way of the Househusband

• Adorkable:
  • Tatsu. A former gang member being completely immersed in a House Husband lifestyle makes for some really weird (and cute) scenes. Especially when he's surrounded by other, more ordinary housewives.
  • His wife Miku also has her moments, like during a shopping trip, where she tries to buy several children's toys and acted like a little girl when Tatsu said no to buying them.
  • Tatsu's rival Torajiro also has his moments. Helps that he is into a lot of the same stuff Tatsu is.
  • While Masa starts of as a bad case of a delinquent who disrespects Tatsu's househusband ways, over time he starts learning from his senior and takes on Tatsu's serious approach to housecare.
• Fridge Brilliance: Torajiro's post-Yakuza job—selling crepes out of a food truck—is reminiscent of Tekiya, iterant merchants who became predecessors of the modern Yakuza.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Tatsu and Miku's marriage is all kinds of adorable, with Tatsu going above and beyond to support her and Miku loving his eccentricities.
  • Tatsu's friendships with the housewives and Ryota.
  • Masa, a delinquent who starts of sucking up to Tatsu but starts to grow into a genuine friend, becoming a junior of sorts to the yakuza-turned-househusband. Several chapters show him casually hanging out with Tatsu and Miku as a friend.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This manga has a Show Within a Show called PoliCure, a police-themed parody of Pretty Cure. Two years later, Pretty Cure's rival, Girls x Heroine!, would do a police-themed series.
  • To make things even funnier, in the anime, Miku, the in-universe fan of the series is voiced by Shizuka Itō who has voiced in Pretty Cure on two separate occasions.
• Moe:
  • Tatsu is fond of products and personal projects that are full of this. Some examples include a cute wooden children's chair and cute bear-shaped bread.
  • The drama adds Tatsu's daughter to the mix. She's a much more straightforwardly cute girl, but her interactions with her dad make her even more adorable.
• Questionable Casting: The casting of Hiroshi Tamaki as Tatsu in the live-action adaptation has generated this reaction among some, though it's less due to doubts about Hiroshi Tamaki's acting chops and more that he's too clean-cut to portray a rugged ex-yakuza like Tatsu. Some argue that Kenjiro Tsuda, Tatsu's VA in the anime, would have been a better fit since he not only has experience with the character but even has Tatsu's rugged looks as well.
• Signature Scene:
  • Tatsu and the roomba, so much so it was partially immortalized in the live-action ad for the manga... minus the carnage caused by the device sucking up Gin's tail.
  • Tatsu meeting another yakuza while walking his dog, with the two intensely asking if they can pet the dogs.
• Tainted by the Preview: When the teaser trailer for the Netflix anime was released, a lot of viewers complained about the Limited Animation which looked more like a motion comic than an actual animated series. Then, it was revealed that this was a deliberate choice from the show's producer, which had even more polarizing reactions. In the first episode, the video store employee seems to deliver a Take That! at anticipated critics of the Limited Animation by mentioning in his rapidfire infodump that "the animators of the second season [of Policure] decided to go for a voiced manga approach and it really pays off", which doesn't help matters any.
• Threesome Subtext: Masa can at times come across less as Tatsu's junior and more as a third in his and Miku's relationship, spending a lot of his appearances hanging out with them on casual outtings like watching movies, having dinner at fancy restaurants, or celebrating Miku's birthday along with the couple. In one chapter, Miku is knocked out by the spice level of a hot pot, and Masa is furious at it for "dropping [his] boy's girl". Once Masa is also knocked out, Tatsu declares that it's personal.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Bob, the only character of African descent in the series, is drawn with "donut lips," an artistic trope that is met with a lot of criticism in the west due to its racist roots. The fact that his lips are colored pink in the anime and he wears somewhat stereotypical clothing doesn't help. However, the majority of viewers don't have issue with his personality, as he's portrayed as a Nice Guy foreigner who genuinely loves Japan, but misses American style cooking. He's also a mild case of Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales as he is one of the very few black characters in manga and anime and is presented as a genuinely wholesome person.
  • A more minor and silly one: While giving a bunch of rapid-fire housekeeping tips, Tatsu notes that you can "make lemonade at home" with water, sugar... and Vitamin C powder. This tip makes a lot of sense in Japan, where fresh fruits are very often expensive and making real homemade lemonade could get pricey. In the US, though, where fresh fruits are much cheaper and citrus trees are very popular in home landscaping (meaning many people often end up with more lemons than they know what to do with), it comes off as a little silly.
• Values Resonance: Domestic men, played straight, in Western series still tend to be fairly rare—either they tend toward tropes like Men Can't Keep House and A Day in Her Apron, where men are shown as either bad at, or dismissive of, housework, or they're treated as remarkable exceptions who either have to reluctantly learn how to keep house or who have to defend their choice to become homemakers. Tatsu's portrayal as a happy and enthusiastic househusband from the get-go, whose choices and skills are never questioned, makes him a charming and refreshing character for Western audiences too. It helps that the comedy in the show is almost never derived from Tatsu's gender, and entirely from the idiosyncratic ways he does mundane household tasks.

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