PinkuBentoBox

I was going to write a series of impressions on the new shows this season, much like I did last season, but to be honest the sense of mediocrity which pervades the bulk of the season with its putrid stench has made me rethink the whole idea. To be blunt, everything new this season that’s not a sequel, to borrow a phrase from my esteemed colleague, is made of shit-flavoured ass biscuits.

First you have Rosario + Vampire. We all knew that this was in all likelihood going to be a piece of shit - after all, it’s the latest show to be squeezed out from between the cheeks of the Gonzo mediocrity factory - but I really wasn’t prepared for just how bad this turned out to be. Fanservice shows have changed a lot since I got into this hobby, and I’m not convinced that their evolution has actually been an evolution rather than a devolution. At least back then if you were watching something with all the appeal of a nature documentary describing the mating habits of Archimantis latistyla, you were secure in the knowledge that one of the chicks might flop out her tits every now and then. Nowadays that would be covered over by layers of steam, or a dark smudge as if the cameraman filming the only worthwhile part of the show had put part of his greasy paw over the fucking lens, or creative use of camera angles combined with strategically placed foreground items, or even the cartoon head of an animal or a small Japanese man in a business suit holding a sign saying BUY THE OVERPRICED DVD, FUCKKNUCKLES. Or you could just go the route that Rosario + Vampire goes, and just throw in a low-angle shot of some girl’s panties every few minutes. The problem is that this is exactly equivalent to the proverbial polishing of the turd. There isn’t a single redeeming feature in this show. The appealing character art bandied about prior to its commencement is shown to be a hollow representation of the show’s content, which has clearly been produced by a cheap korean sweatshop, complete with the wonky faces and eyes that stare off in different directions. The fact that it’s been broadcast in High Definition only serves to highlight this shortcoming. To call the plot trite is a vast understatement: it sucks on a similar magnitude to a black hole. The ‘heroine’ is a brainless sack of shit with thighs that are completely out of proportion with the rest of her body, the whole vampire gimmick has been done so often now that the horse they’re beating has died, been reanimated as an undead abomination, and then killed again. The worst part about this show is that having seen it, there’s no way to un-see it short of forcibly injecting a ball of lead into my brainpan.

H2O ~ Footprints in the Sand ~ is merely a pile of mediocrity. How many times can Japan re-make the same show before people begin to get tired of it? There has to have been at least two or three of these functionally identical pieces of crap every season since the turn of the fucking century. Generic Male Protagonist meets a pile of girls and is nice to them and resolves all their issues because they’re unable to do anything for themselves. You could seriously design the bulk of these shows by building a fucking madlibs system. Build the girls with a little from column A and some of column B, much like you would when having the set menu at a fucking Chinese restaurant. Then you select the gimmick. This time, it’s blindness. The main character is blind. Except by the end of the first fucking episode he isn’t, gimmick thrown out the window because it’s clearly too hard and I imagine makes for some pretty fucking awkward sex. That this is one of the slightly more appealing shows of the season doesn’t say a lot of positive things about the rest of the season, but then, the season sucking big chunks of shit is the premise of this whole entry.

On the other hand, Kimi ga Aruji de shitpile dips well below the mediocrity line. While it may not be quite as bad as Rosario + Vampire, this is akin to saying that being poked in the eye repeatedly by a giant horse cock is not as bad as if it had been an elephant cock. You’re still having a giant phallus repeatedly and violently introduced to your face. I use this particular analogy because I know that there are people out there who would enjoy that activity. I am not one, though when I stop and think about it might actually be a more interesting and unique experience than this show. Essentially this is a copy of Hayate no Gotoku, and like a substandard copy of a third-generation VHS bootleg, it’s only gotten worse. Where Hayate no Gotoku charmed with a well-defined cast and amusing references to other shows before it decided that it needed to be longer than a fucking bardic saga and drastically overstayed its welcome, Kimiaru simply relies on recycling the same tired moe stereotypes that every other fucking show this season seems to be hung up on, and then adds a set of unnaturally proportioned tits to try and seal the deal. Add to that a self-professed “sexy” loli, a maid with a name that is apparently incredibly amusing if you speak moon, and a generic male protagonist who has a set of whiskers that make him look like some kind of chimeric blending of a human with an otter. And there’s the trap. Japan is obsessed with putting these androgynous little shits into everything now. About the only upside is that the show should be mercifully short.

Persona might actually be a reasonably good show. At least, it might if it wasn’t nonsensical bullshit squarely aimed at a very specific demographic: people who give a shit about the Shin Megami Tensei games. Given that this is some kind of sequel to what was by all accounts a reasonably average niche RPG, it’s not surprising that it turned out to be exceedingly average in turn. I was holding out some hope for this show, but the design work that’s gone into it is so transparently dry and clinical that it’s like reading Asimov in the middle of a fucking desert. You can practically see the executives sitting in their board room with a checklist of all the components to necessary to make a pretty but ultimately unremarkable by-the-numbers anime show. Takehito Koyasu? Check. It’s not as if he’s been in every second fucking show ever produced or anything, right? Bland, generic anime male RPG protagonist with a potentially mysterious past? Check. Androgynous sibling that may or may not be fucking insane? Check. Nonsensical plot elements introduced with little or no explanation of the setting or just what the shit is going on? Fucking Check. Bizzare ghost-like supernatural monster crap? Check. If they’d actually bothered to give some kind of reference point to make sense of the byzantine mess presented, it might be okay. I just can’t get past the overwhelming stench that wafts out of every aspect of the production. It smells like mediocrity. The most unfortunate thing about this show is that it’s possibly the only one besides Aria and Zetsubou to have some redeeming factors, and I’ll take mediocrity over unadulterated bullshit if I have to.

I’m not even going to talk about Shigofumi, as having run a gauntlet of garbage, finding that yet another show is a trite, generic crapfest with awful art and maddeningly uninspired characters is mildly depressing. So I continue to True Tears. True Tears is, predictably, an adaption of yet another crappy formulaic galge. The noteworthy thing here is that despite this fact being trumpeted on the website for the game, the characters seem to be completely different from the set of moeblobs presented in the original work. I can’t explain why this is, except propose that there is a distinct possibility that, of all things, there might be a Japanese studio working on a galge adaption and not retreading the same tired material exactly. It seems unlikely, though. The show also seems to be punching well above its weight, with animation quality that seems incongruous given that the show has its genesis in a by-the-numbers game dominated by a premise involving a woefully generic male character convincing a multitude of fresh-from-the-moe-factory girls to have sex with him in a variety of environments. The production studio appears to be primarily staffed with people who were part of Production I.G.’s outsourcer-of-choice for all the Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex stuff. All signs point towards this being something remotely worthwhile. There’s just one major issue: it’s a pile of uninspired, unremarkable toss.

My mind rebels when I try and comprehend what exactly it is about Spice and Wolf that has set the internet ablaze. Whatever it is, I’m not seeing it. Are the bulk of anime fans closet furries or something? I mean, I personally have nothing against catgirls, doggirls, foxgirls or anything like that - in fact I watched the shit out of Inukami for precisely that reason - however there was a big difference between that and this. Primarily, Inukami wasn’t just generic crap. The whole premise of this show seems to be lost in their mad scramble to have Horo spend as much time naked as possible. While her facsimile of a human body is reasonably good, she apparently forgot that human girls have nipples, which makes me just stop and think, seriously, what’s the point? Add to that the absolutely retarded casting decision which results in us having Lelouch’s voice attached to a trader who lies awake at night, weeping quietly at the fact that he doesn’t have as much awesome in the big toe of his left foot as his idol, Ginko, and you have… well, one of the better shows this season. But that’s really like saying that this log of shit is slightly better than the other ones because it has some corn in it.

And finally we have Minami-ke Okawari. While I really can’t say that this one is bad, it certainly is mediocre, especially when compared to the lofty standards set by the original season. While the humor is pretty much the same in spirit, and it certainly is still amusing, it feels a lot like the new team somehow had managed to miss the point. A lot of the gags fall flat, and they seem to be completely at a loss as to how to handle Hosaka. Add to this the inexplicable desire to up the fanservice quotient significantly and it’s quite clear that the edge that the old team had having worked on Ichigo Mashimaro previously really did end up helping them produce a much more amusing show, and the new team are a little at a loss figuring out how they should put everything together. More disturbingly, while the new character designs are fine after the five minutes or so it takes you to adjust, the animation itself looks terrible. They keep using terrible camera angles and strange perspective distortions which just end up looking shitty, and the budget-skimping even extends to shit like them not drawing faces on characters in the background, which is downright disturbing. Even more irritatingly, this is still probably the best show of the season, but none of the established groups are subbing it. There are three groups on it now, but it’s a pretty much a crapshoot trying to get a decent sub for each episode. The rest of them are too busy having penis-length contests over who can make the spiciest wolf subs.

I dunno, maybe the problem is just me here. Maybe I’m just losing interest in anime or getting disenfranchised or something. God knows that it’s been a long time that I’ve really gotten engaged by a show - the last one I got into in a big way was probably Simoun - but these last six months have been an utter fucking drought as far as stuff that’s not generic moe garbage goes. Hopefully next season will be better.