Maken-ki
Number of Episodes: 12
Production Company: AIC
Brief Overview: Takeru Ooyama, a normal high school boy, is accepted into a special school where the students practice magic and combat each-other. The problem is, Takeru can't find a skill that suits him. While he's there he reconnects with a childhood friend, a girl who considers him her fiancé, and another who's out to kill him.
Episode Summary: When Takeru Ooyama chose to enter Tenbi Academy, it was due to the fact that there was no entrance exam and that it was a former girls-only school which recently became co-ed. After spending his middle school years at an all-boys academy, he decided that he'd prefer to ogle girls instead. What he didn't realize was that the school follows its own set of rules, some of which involve battling it out with other students using special powers. Takeru gets a taste of this violence when he's challenged to a duel at the entrance ceremony.
He's already attending the school with his friend and former dojo-mate Haruko, but on his first day he attracts the ire of school ojou-sama Himegami, and discovers that he has a fiancée, Inaho. To make things more complicated, all 3 of them decide that Takeru needs to be constantly monitored, so they move into his room in order to keep watch on him at all times.
Thoughts: This episode seems to expect quite a bit from its viewers. It expects them to not only overlook the fact that its main character somehow managed to make it as far as his school's entrance ceremony without realizing that the school requires that its students battle each-other, but also to believe that the female characters, most of whom are extremely top-heavy, could exist for more than a few minutes, let-alone engage in highly physical duels, without breaking their backs or toppling over. They also seem to suggest, if the end of the episode is any indication, that I should not find it odd that 3 girls who exhibit brutal strength and battle prowess would want to, instead of demonstrating some self-respect and dignity, spend their time getting jealous over a clueless loser who appears to have no idea
what he's doing in most facets of life. Yes, this show expects all that and more - it expects me to watch it all without running to the bathroom and throwing up from the sheer stupidity of it all. The dumb, it burns.
The way that most of the shots are framed, I think the director would have me believe that there are no actual human females in this show, only panty-clad vaginas with legs, torsos and talking heads attached as an afterthought. The volume of blatant, graphic upskirt shots is definitely above average even for an ecchi anime, and every vagina seems to emit the bright piercing light of censorship from within its all-too-detailed anatomy (buy the DVD, and you can see every lovingly-crafted bulge and fold in its full, uncensored glory!). This is one of those instances where the old saying "less is more" should really have been considered. I can see how a peep up a girl's skirt could be someone's naughty adolescent pleasure, even if I dislike that particular gag in any incarnation. Stuff like this, though, is just grossly anatomical and seems employed mostly to push the envelope and be more extreme than the next anime. I think that men are attractive, but I honestly have no desire to see some man sporting a bulging erection within a Speedo swimsuit, nor to longingly gaze upon his taint, and that would be the direct male equivalent to what's being shown liberally within this anime.
Again, there are quite a few shots that reinforce the idea that women aren't worth listening to, only worth ogling. Much of their dialog is spoken while the camera is staring straight at their ladybits or through their open legs. "Don't worry everyone, she'll stop talking eventually. Until then, let's take a long, lingering stare at her va-jay-jay and contemplate the meaning of life." During those rare moments where it is necessary to show a female character's face, the character designer has made sure that most of them have such large breasts that it's difficult to focus one's attention on anything else. I have a certain amount of leeway within my mind regarding anime character designs since very few of them are anatomically realistic, but I draw the line at the point where my own back begins to ache out of sympathy for the female characters who are being forced to smuggle water balloons everywhere they go.
Do I dare even speak of the male lead? His aforementioned stupidity is but a thin candy shell over a chocolatey center of bland perversity. He's an everyman, only worse; while most average folks may have a hidden talent or 2, this guy is implied to be the wielder of some amazing power by chance, one which will most likely attract every girl to his side 
and bestow upon him undeserved coolness in the eyes of his peers (except for the one girl who hates his guts, but secretly wants to get it on with him, obviously). In all seriousness, what self-respecting, sane girl would show any interest in a guy who outright admits to his own laziness (by choosing a school that doesn't require one to study for an entrance exam) and lack of awareness (by overlooking the fact that students at the school are quite literally getting into fights)? What an absolutely boring person to have as a central character.
My one blessing in this case has been that I've been coming down with a cold and thus my normal level of snark has been boosted quite a bit. One has to have a sense of humor when reviewing anime like this, because without the shield of laughter I might eventually find myself descending into a deep depression. I see anime like this continuing to get made, and I can't help but consider that there are people who hate women so much that they reduce them to the very few body parts that they see as worthwhile. They make them say and do things that paint them as irrational, jealous, petty and foolish yet ripe for the picking. And people wonder why I'm so wary of the anime fandom at times.
In the end this appears to be just another frothy panty fighter that's short on respectability and long on misogyny. The camera has a definite labia fetish, but besides that the only remarkable thing about the series so far is that it's probably the raunchiest thing I'll be sampling this season. I don't know if this is something that anime creators want to hear, but I'll go ahead and say it; we women are more than just boobs and butts, we also have brains, and mine is telling me to give this steaming pile of adolescent wish-fulfillment a wide berth.
Pros:
- This is probably the raunchiest thing that I'll have to watch this season.
Cons:
- Women are reduced to being breasts and vaginas and their dialog is often overshadowed by images along those lines.
- The protagonist is useless doofus.
Recommended? The word "recommend" does not belong anywhere near this show.
More:
It's a little amazing how they manage to reach the bottom of one barrel, then tunnel through it and find another barrel beneath that one, and ... you get the idea. It's barrels' bottoms all the way down.
I've just resigned myself to the fact that creators of media will continue to find new ways to make me sad for the state of the human race.
It all makes more sense when you realize that this director did the whole Ikki Tousen franchise.
Having said that, in terms of graphic images and camera angles, it's actually quite true to the manga. It isn't really the director's fault.
Whoever's fault it was, someone needs to be punished for it, maybe direct a few season's of Doraemon in penance. I don't really absolve the director from fault anyway - he had a choice at some point to work with the storyboard artist and make changes, which he apparently didn't.
What's especially saddening is that two great talents wasted their talent making this. The lead character artist is apparently Nobuteru Yuki, character designer of Escaflowne, and the producer is Yousuke Kuroda, who wrote the scripts for Trigun and a number of 90's classics. Two great talents of beautiful nostalgic anime join together and this is what they give us?
My bad, meant to say Kuroda is the writer in my last comment.
With all due respect, I'm not sure he did have that choice. Of course he had the choice of refusing the project (and starving), but when you're doing a manga adaptation, you're pretty much stuck with what the manga gave you. The primary audience for the show is expected to be readers of the manga, and they're going to expect that the show is faithful to the source material.
It's a business, after all, and ratings are where it's at. The reason so many of the shows we see are adaptations of other material is that such shows come with a built-in audience.
If this director had seriously toned down the visuals, the manga's readers would have screamed, and (more importantly) not bought the BDs when they come out. From the point of view of AIC, that last would be disastrous. So he didn't have that choice, except in an academic sense.
"Taint gazing"? Sounds kinda like bird-watching, but performed from stranger angles and with more self-loathing.
Apologies, I came off with a worse attitude than I meant to.
I'm not going to argue the point because I was off in blaming the director. But it's very sad to see talent being mismanaged to such a huge degree like this. And I'm not willing to back down on the point that the show and the way it's directed is hateful to me and others of my ilk, whatever amount of choice there was in the matter or not.
Ha! I was looking for a creative choice of words, but when you think about it, the idea is pretty comical.
Per the book "Brandwashed", when the people behind Axe body spray were doing intensive marketing research before bringing out the product, they discovered that the number one sexual fantasy of males 15-25 was "being considered sexually desirable by multiple attractive women at the same time." Many outliers, of course, but that was the one widest shared among young men.
So the "harem" subgenre's popularity among young men is not exactly a surprise.
It's worth mentioning, though, that Axe's marketing campaign backfired by being a bit too successful. The ads that promised "if you use Axe body spray, you won't be a pathetic loser who can't get laid anymore" were so convincing, that Axe became known to the general public as the official body spray of pathetic losers who can't get laid....
Wow, I was actually expecting C3 or whatever it's called to be the worst this season. This apparently makes C3 look like a church.
Haha! Well, it's certainly not the worst that I've ever seen, but it certainly does have C3 beat.
Unfortunately I suppose it's the same deal with the stereotype that male otaku aren't interested in (or can't manage to date) real women. We know that it's not true, but I think outsiders to the fandom look at this sort of show and make the assumption that otaku must be losers who can't find a date. :/
Oh, you'd be surprised by the number of otaku, especially hardcore ones in Japan, who'd rather pretend to marry a dating sim character or cuddle a dakimakura than go out and find a real woman to be with, because they think their fantasy girls are superior...
I've also personally seen huge numbers of otaku from this side of the world who simply can't manage to pick up a date unless the girl is just as big an otaku. Unfortunately for them, they often try to get girls who AREN'T just as big an otaku. And another portion of them have limited themselves to only oriental girls, or even only Japanese girls, because they've deluded themselves into thinking the Japanese are the holy master race and every Japanese person must be obsessed with anime.
This show is why hentai mangaka should NEVER do a mainstream series. They always make it just boring ecchi crap. I mean, if all they want to do is show half-naked girls everywhere, why don't they just make it hentai instead? At least THAT way you'll be getting actual sex out the deal!