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Million Doll and Jitsu wa Watashi wa – Decent but still dropped

The last post featured anime I didn’t like enough to even finish an episode of. This post features two shows I fairly enjoyed the first episode of but didn’t see the need to watch the rest of. Once you watch enough anime, you’re able to get a general sense for what a show is going to like just from the introductory episode. Million Doll and Jitsu wa Watashi wa are both shows I would probably enjoy moderately if I’d continued, but they weren’t gripping enough to justify the time and effort so I’m saying goodbye to them on a positive note.

Million Doll – Each episode is short, which is always a good thing. The music is extremely forgettable, which is only natural for idol music. Although it’s a show about cute young girls, they did show some of the darker elements of idol life, including the fickle fandom and the poor amenities (playing to small crowds, having to walk home from the airport) as well as some of the rewards, mainly having people support and cheer you on.

Good for them, but they’d either have to make the music a lot better or the show a lot more realistic or at least introduce some direct competition before they could interest me enough to watch the whole show.

Jitsu wa Watashi wa – I don’t mind romances where you already know who’s going to end up with who from the start – if anything, that’s my preference. So I thought I would like Jitsu wa, but the main guy is just too awkward with too many weird expressions to enjoy. I know it’s his gimmick, but it’s uncomfortable to watch.

The show is also extremely slow because half the ‘action’ takes place in the mind of the main character. He spends too much time thinking and thinking about things before saying or doing anything, it’s annoying.

Since his relationship with the vampire girl is all but established in episode 1 and since I’ve seen enough of this kind of show to know how things are going to go (slowly growing closer, opposition from girl’s family, reporter girl trying to expose her secret, etc) and since the lengths he’ll have to go to to keep her secret will lead to all kinds of embarrassing situations, which I really hate, so I’m gonna bail out now. It was a cute show, but one episode was enough.

Neeext!

My Little Monster anime review (eps 1-5)

I’m not sure how exactly I came to start watching My Little Monster (Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun). I think I may have downloaded an episode by accident when looking for Tonari no Seki-kun episodes, or maybe I got it back when it was first airing and forgot about it. Either way before I knew it I had the first episode on my laptop, so I proceeded to watch it a few days ago.

Story: Shizuku Mizutani only has one thing in mind: getting good grades. To accomplish this goal, she has little interest in anything else. However, after delivering lesson notes to her resident delinquent classmate Haru Yoshida, the latter is convinced that they are friends. Initially, Shizuku is intimidated by such a troublesome person, but she gradually notices that Haru is actually a kind person. When Haru confesses to Shizuku, an unlikely romance begins to blossom between them.

I liked: The blunt honesty of the main characters. Haru is a very silly guy, but he’s very open about his feelings for Shizuku. Shizuku is also a nice change from the usual cowardly, simpering, brainless shoujo main character. She actually has a spine and an agenda outside “Get guy X to like me”, at least at first. I also found it unusual but intriguing to have the main guy confess to the main girl so early in the show and then have her return his feelings just an episode or two later.

I didn’t like: Unfortunately we can’t have anything so refreshing in a shoujo series, so instead of building up the relationship from there, the two confessions somehow cancel each other out. Huh? Only in anime, eh? Thus instead of the different take on shoujo romance I was hoping for, we end up with the same old “He loves me, he loves me not, maybe he loves this other girl, maybe I don’t love him” merry-go-round that we’ve seen 20,000 times before. My Little Monster, I am disappoint.

What’s worse than that is the downfall of Haru’s character. He started out a little wild but basically a good guy… for all of 10 minutes in the first episode. Then he turns into the kind of guy who smacks Shizuku in the face and never apologizes and regularly seizes her by the collar but somehow he’s still her love interest anyway. “He hits me but it’s okay because he loves me?” Not only is it not okay, but he doesn’t even love you!

Every other episode she’s like “Haru’s such a kind person.” What kind of kind person would punch a girl and not even say he was sorry? Even your garden-variety domestic abuser can muster up a few crocodile tears of apology every time. Up to the end of episode 5 it still wasn’t clear what exactly Shizuku saw in Haru. It seems like she would have felt the same way about any other guy with a nice smile who confessed his love and kissed her within a few days of meeting her.

The other issue with Haru’s personality is probably less his fault and more my problem for being sick and tired of every single shoujo manga love interest having some kind of family issue and some kind of dark history and some kind of trauma somewhere. It’s like an edict was passed around 1995 stating that no sensible, decent, well-adjusted guy was allowed to be the main guy in shoujo manga ever again. They all have to be messed up somehow, no exceptions. Well 1995 was 20 years ago, can we go back to ordinary, likeable, relateable male characters now? Please?

That way Haru could have stayed the funny, naive, happy-go-lucky guy (with a violent streak) that he started out as instead of having to deal with all this drama with his dad and his brother and who knows what else in his family. I don’t want to watch all that, it’s boring. I’m sure Shizuku will later turn out to have issues of her own, equal opportunity and all that. She’s already lost the focus on grades that made her interesting and become the usual “Squee, he smiled at me *blush blush*” kind of heroine. *sigh*

Long story short, I don’t want to see anything more from this show. My Little Monster is just the same old shoujo tropes dolled up slightly differently but ultimately working out the same way. If you like shoujo manga, you’ll probably love it since it’s more of the same with a slight twist. If you’re not a fan of the old “going round in circles for 10 volumes rigamarole, avoid. For me it’s dropped after 5 episodes. On to the next show!

Saekano after 6 episodes (dropped)

You can refer to my first post on Saenai Kanojo no Sodatekata here. Basically I thought the show had a bit of promise but didn’t want to wait every week for new episodes so I shelved it until it was complete and then some. 9 months later I finally settled down to watch the show, but…

As I said back then, I wanted to see what would happen when you added a third, ordinary character to a generic anime love triangle. The answer seems to be absolutely nothing. After episode 3 it seemed like best girl Megumi had won (or rather lost, since the hero Tomoya is so annoying), which was all good and nice, but then episode 6 rolls around and it’s all about Tomoya’s past, angsty non-relationship with Utaha-sempai? Where’d that come from? And who cares? It doesn’t matter any more. I thought best girl had won!

I hate those series where the author spends a little time building a relationship between A and B, then no, no, C has a chance too, no wait, D too, and round and round and round it goes. When I sign up for a harem I know it’s a harem, so I’m ready for that whole rigamarole (that’s why I avoid harems these days actually) but I was hoping for something a little less stale and hackneyed with Saekano. More fool me, I guess. Basically I dropped Saekano because it turned out to be a harem when I wasn’t looking for a harem.

There’s a second reason, though, which is the visual novel Tomoya and his group are going to be making. The story was revealed around episode 5 and TBH it’s bad. Really bad. It starts well but then turns into a yandere incestuous reincarnation romance with giant monsters? If it’s supposed to be a parody of something famous (Eva? Titan?) then sorry, it flew clean over my head. And hopefully landed in the garbage dump, there to stay forever. And the characters are just falling over themselves gushing with praise about how moving it is. Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t even let my dog poop on a story like that. No thanks.

To recap, I can’t support the romance because it’s not going the way I wanted it to. And just btw, Tomoya is a lot more annoying than I remember. That ‘noisy passionate otaku’ gimmick was funny the first few times I saw it, but now it’s played out. His brief moments of seriousness only making the yelling more obnoxious, because then his whole otaku persona just seems put-on and fake. Just be a normal guy, okay? There’s only one good character in the whole show and I think Megumi would be better off walking away from this whole stupid circle.

Right, so to recap the romance sucks and the game they’re making sucks, so there’s nothing for me root for in Saekano. If I had nothing else to watch I might finish it out of sheer inertia, but my backlog is HUGE and growing larger all the time. If an anime isn’t really knocking my socks off after 6 episodes I think I’m better off just reading summaries online and moving on to something else. Saekano is best left to people who like otaku romances that probably won’t ever go anywhere, the end.

Chou (Super) Virgin manga review

A seven-volume romantic/cross-dressing comedy by Uchida Fujimaru. The protagonist is Hanazono Ippei, a middle-school student who suffers from the interestingly-named “Cherry Boy” Syndrome, which means he freaks out completely whenever he even goes near a girl. Thanks to that he fails an exam for a co-ed high school, which means he loses a bet he had with his dad and has to dress up like a girl and work in their restaurant.

However, Ippei finds out that as a girl he has no problem at all talking to girls and gets a crush on one of the customers on the same day. This is good news for him… right?

Uhh, not quite. It’s never that simple. Dressed as Ichiko, Ippei manages to win Rika (his crush’s) trust while simultaneously sort-of dating her as Ippei. And then there’s the fact that Rika is a pro-wrestler whose her arch-rival falls in love with Ippei, which means you’ve got the beginnings of a far-from-ordinary romantic comedy.

Chou (Super) Virgin! was pretty good, since it had a good balance of romance, action and comedy. Ippei gets involved in pro-wrestling, has to save Rika from the clutches of a rival (who then falls in love with Ichiko), has to navigate his way through several tiffs with Rika, and has to keep his secret from coming out while slowly getting over his Cherry Boy Syndrome issues.

The ending was happy, but left a bit to be desired. SPOILERS: Rika finds out about the deception and is rightfully mad, but then Ippei goes “I love you! I only did this because I love you!” and then everything is somehow okay again and they’re a couple. The ending shows he explained his problem to her and that she forgave him, but it really is sudden. And they haven’t shown how they’re going to resolve the issue of her being 19 and on her own and he being 16 and in school. 10 years from now it won’t even matter, but right now they’re at very different places in life.

But well, all’s well that ends well. It was a fun series, not too many wacky hijinks, an interesting cast, and a happy ending. Can’t ask for much more than that.

Cherry manga review

Cherry is a short romantic comedy series by Eisaku Kubonouchi. I quit after one volume, then skipped to the end to find out it was all a dream… or was it? The story is about two young adults from the boonies who meet, fall in love “at first sight” and run away together to Tokyo to avoid a forced marriage.

At first Cherry seemed like it would be an interesting look at the difficulties of city life for a pair of outsiders with no money. Can they overcome the barriers, or will they be forced to go home in despair? Will Fuuko’s rich family come looking for her? Will the police? Where will they live? What will they do for money? What— stop worrying. Kubonouchi took the easy way out.

The couple almost immediately run into helpful people who give them a place to live, both Fuuko and her boyfriend find part-time jobs almost immediately, everybody loves the innocent, cheerful Fuuko, and Sakurabou’s only worry becomes “When can I have sex with Fuuko?” Every time he shows up, that’s all he can think about. I felt filthy just reading it, so I quit.

*spoilers for how it ends*
I skipped to the last chapter and it turns out everything was a dream. The house Fuuko supposedly lived in is ruined and empty, the people he “met” are probably people he imagined from reading about them in a magazine, and his ex-girlfriend is the one who runs from her wedding to be with him, not Fuuko. Fuuko never existed in the first place…or did she? There are a couple of problems with this:

1. This setup would have worked for a 1 volume series. After 4 volumes, however, the readers have grown to know and love the cast. Fuuko in particular has been shoved heavily down our throats, and now you say she never existed?
2. Several months must have passed in Sakurabou’s dream. In that time he must have fallen head over heels for Fuuko and forgotten all about his old GF (Meguppe who?). You can’t send him back to the beginning and tell him to re-fall for Meguppe, it’s not so simple.
3. Meguppe leaves her wedding to come see Sakurabou. But he still has no job, no prospects, no place of his own and no proper education. As long as he doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, he can’t take care of anyone else. They have no future.
4. In the original timeline Meguppe turned into a skank who insulted and dumped Sakurabou very cruelly after leaving for Tokyo. Having seen this side of her, he’ll probably never be able to see her in the same light again. At the very least he’ll never trust her, so this relationship is not going to work.

In other words, “It was all just a dream” doesn’t solve anything at all! Thanks for that slap in the face, Kubonouchi. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.