Month: August 2017

 Keita Amano is a lonely young man who loves video games; Karen Tendō is the beautiful president of the video game club; Chiaki Hoshinomori constantly fights with Keita; and Tasuku Uehara puts on a facade of being satisfied with his life in the real world, but he in truth loves video games. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode 1 Summary: Keita Amano’s high school life is lacking in the things that make fun – he’s got no friends and he doesn’t belong to any clubs. He goes home everyday and spends his evenings playing video games. While perusing new titles in the game shop he’s approached by Karen Tendou, his schools’ most beautiful, smart, and popular student. She invites him to join the newly-reestablished game club she’s put together at their school, and she’s extremely passionate about it. All the current members are experts at the various types of games that they play, and they all seem to have much larger reasons for playing them than “they’re just fun to play.” Keita starts to feel like the odd one out, since he just likes to play video games for his own enjoyment. When Karen asks him to join the club officially, he declines in spite of multiple reasons why he knows the experience will be good for him. Though, to Karen, this feels like the ultimate rejection, it’s likely that this isn’t the last word in the matter.

Impressions: Most people have hobbies, and I think for many, their hobbies are a type of escapism. I don’t sit down and knit a scarf because I need another scarf to wear; I knit the scarf because I like the experience of choosing the right yarn, of feeling it running through my fingers with each stitch, and of watching the rhythmic loops upon loops of fiber expand into a finished project. I can knit while watching television or just enjoying the quiet somewhere, and it helps me relax. If I were to start an Etsy shop to sell my finished projects, suddenly a hobby that I enjoy would morph into an obligation, losing all of its power to take me out of my daily life. It’s the same reason why I don’t really do art commissions or write articles for money; when there’s a transaction involved, it just isn’t that fun anymore. When there’s a hard deadline, it’s much easier to stress about it.

I can understand Keita’s reluctance to join Karen’s video game club, in spite of all the potential positives. He likes to game in his room, alone; it’s a form of relaxation after spending all day at school feeling mediocre and isolated from his classmates. Why would he want to place himself among people who play video games for a broader purpose? It would only invite comparisons in which he comes out looking like an aimless doofus.

These are thoughts I never expected to have while watching yet another anime about some hapless high school kid with a crush on a girl who joins a club full of misfits on some grand time-wasting adventure in slice-of-life territory. There are a lot of pieces in this show that seem to defy expectations, and I find that kind of fascinating. In my defense, the promotional image for the series is misleading – it makes it seem as though the protagonist, through some form of dumb luck (or “protagonist syndrome”), gets thrust into a group of girls, creating the potential for a romantic entanglement while the obnoxious male sidekick cracks jokes and acts as wing man throughout. Just in this episode I think we were introduced to at least four total male characters and roughly an equivalent number of young women, taking the ratio pretty far out of harem territory (two of the characters are even already a couple). The assumed romantic relationship between Keita and Karen is already in a very different place; rather than dancing around an awkward attraction, things are already on the rocks and Keita’s denial of her club invitation is even framed as a romantic rejection. Whether this is a setup to turn things back around in twelve episodes is a mystery, but it definitely went against my own expectations.

There are also several humorous interjections via the on-screen text throughout the episode. They’re kind of self-aware, from the POV of some omniscient narrator, and give some snappy perspective on future developments for the characters. It’s reminiscent of, say, Ouran High School Host Club, with its blinking pointer-finger indicator of the doomed vase in episode 1, or even some live-action films like Scott Pilgrim (which, coincidentally, also deals in video game culture for its aesthetics) that are self-aware and call blatant attention to it via blending of referential special effects. Stuff like this always runs the risk of making media feel too “know-it-all” about its own tropes through overuse, but it’s used sparingly enough here that it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

The episode does fall in line with some expectations, however, especially in regards to the character relationships between boys and girls. There’s still kind of a disappointing lack of sexual awareness that Keita displays towards Karen; there are a few shots of her legs and body from Keita’s point-of-view that follow with him blushing and being unable to get words out of his mouth properly. Attraction turns some of us into disasters, but I have yet to meet a teenage kid who is made into such a mess from seeing an attractive person that their eyes wander around their crush’s body like the cameras in these anime series seem to think they do. Shots like that are one of those tools of the trade that are used as a shortcut, but which could be eliminated with just a minor amount of finesse (and a big dose of respect towards women and their bodies – this is probably the bigger hurdle).

Aside from that, though, I found myself amused by some of the game parodies already featured in the first episode (will there be more? I hope so). Karen’s polite conversation with King Koopa as a result of her delirium from lack of sleep, was surprisingly funny for a show where I didn’t expect there to be a decent comedic element. Video games are part of our shared culture, and as a Gen-X/Millennial cusp baby, I’ve experienced most of the big, important moments as games have grown into their own as an art form. In part, this show (and likely the light novel on which it was based) seems to have some of that same perspective. Even if it never takes on any of that broader cultural analysis (which it definitely doesn’t have to), it’s still fun to see the things that I’m familiar with featured fondly in an entertaining way.

In any case, sometimes hobbies are just distractions, and that’s okay. But even if a beloved hobby never provides the potential for financial compensation and couldn’t necessarily morph into a day job, there could also be a happy medium (like, say, watching anime and having an opinion on it…). Keita might not have a broader purpose to his gaming, and competitiveness might not be something he wants to inject into his hobby. But perhaps there’s a happy medium somewhere, and I’m actually kind of surprised at how interested I am to see how the show handles this proposition.

Pros: The show seems somewhat self-aware about its own tropes, and can be pretty funny about it. The cast is large enough that, while there could be love triangles or whatever, it doesn’t feel like a harem.

Cons: The show is still pessimistic about teenage male sexuality.

Grade: B-

Kyō Nukui is a high school student who tends to skip school due to a trauma in his past. Kyō secretly creates songs using vocal song synthesis software as his hobby. Three girls who just entered fifth grade — the crybaby Jun “Jun-tan” Gotō, the strong-willed Nozomi “Zomi” Momijidani, and the somewhat sleepy Sora “Kū” Kaneshiro who takes life at her own pace — email Kyō. These three girls, who were raised together like sisters since childhood, want Kyō to help them break into music. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode 1 Summary: Kyo Nukui is a hikkikomori who, in the spare time he has being home-bound, creates electronic music and posts it online. One day he posts something in a completely different style, posts it under a different pseudonym, and wonders if anyone will know the difference. Later, he receives an incredibly formal email from someone who made the connection between his new work and his older, more well-known stuff, and this person wants to set up a meeting. Mustering all of the sociability he can, Kyo walks to the specified meeting place in a local park. He’s expecting to see someone older, based on the language in the messages, but the author is really an elementary school girl named Jun, who’s incredibly shy. She’s there with her two friends, Zomi and Ku, who were all raised at the same orphanage together. It’s their dream to put on a concert, and the girls certainly have the equipment to do so; the church basement has some great vintage guitars and the gear to go with it. It also turns out that they can sing and play the intruments pretty darned well – and they want Kyo to help them live out their dream of bringing people together through music.

Thoughts: I was driving to work recently, and was stuck in pretty heavy traffic. Someone a few cars in front of me stopped suddenly, causing a chain reaction where all subsequent vehicles, including myself, had to react in seconds. I braked hard, and hoped beyond all hope that the person behind me would notice in time to stop before ramming my tiny Mazda and turning it into scrap metal. Time seemed to slow down as I watched the (much larger) SUV pull up behind me way too quickly, as I pumped my brakes in hopes of signaling them somehow. Luckily, they were able to stop; I could hear the honking and engine noises once again and I was drawn out of my panic, and we were soon on our way down the entrance ramp towards the city.

My story had a happy ending; oftentimes, however, you can see a car wreck about to happen, and there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

This episode starts of by fooling you into thinking that perhaps the underage girls in the promo images aren’t a huge part of the show. The opening scenes are focused on the main character’s anxiety and depression and the outlet that he has in making music. Anime doesn’t have a great track record in portraying mental illness, but these first few moments didn’t raise a lot of red flags to me in that regard, and I was willing to entertain the possibility that it could be better-than-mediocre somehow. With the introduction of the three fifth-graders, I was starting to see distant brake lights, as if something terrible had happened just over the next hill. I was concerned by their blushing cheeks, the weird shots of their too-shiny knees and ankles, and their infantile voice, not to mention their glistening, pouty lips. Maybe the colorists just wanted to go all-out and add in a bunch of details?

Then Toonces just drove the damn car straight off the cliff.

One of the last lines of the episode is Nozomi (the dark-haired girl), in exchange for Kyo helping the three orphans put on their concert, offering to let him touch her – just a little bit. I was actually just thinking to myself that it had been kind of a long time since I’d seen anything in anime that was truly vile and reprehensible; It seemed like, back when I was writing more consistently, that there were several anime series every single season that banked on pushing boundaries in regards to good taste. I actually blame the existence of those series for my current feelings about fanservice – I’m continually annoyed, but also find myself saying “well, at least it’s not as bad as [fill in the blank]” and I’ve ended up giving a pass to things that I may not have in a different time or place in my life. In any case, that’s one of the consequences of becoming hardened and complacent as a fan of a medium that can be highly problematic – suddenly you’re blindsided by someone’s bad idea that’s so completely out of line that you wonder how it could have gotten produced.

This show is based on a light novel, that some people ostensibly read at some point. Some people read this novel and thought “hey, this concept seems entertaining. I bet a lot of people would like to see an anime adaptation about this high school guy that hangs out with little girls, and then they’ll surely laugh about their precocious sexuality.” I bet a production committee was gathered, and some music executive was slavering at the mouth, thinking about which voice actresses or idols on their roster would be a good fit to sing the band’s songs and portray the little elementary school girls that people would be inclined to have the hots for. An art designer, a character designer, several animators, and all sorts of staff were hired, and worked long, grueling hours for very little pay to bring to fruition an anime where a little girl implores a high school guy to feel her up.

There were probably dozens of people who had to sign off on something to get this made, and dozens more that poured their energies into its creation. If there’s one thing that Shirobako taught me it’s that really good, talented people sometimes make their money producing things that don’t have much artistic merit. Heck, the music scenes in the show are actually animated pretty well and might be fun to watch if the camera weren’t lingering on the girls’ legs, thighs, and mouths. I don’t want to dishonor the hard work that was put into the show by blaming the staff for the sins of the creators. And, to be honest, this isn’t nearly the most objectionable thing I’ve ever watched in my life. But I will say this – certain things just really rub me the wrong way, and making childlike characters into potential sex objects is one of them. Whether or not the episode’s final line was a misunderstood joke, something that will be explained away in episode 2, or something that will never come up again, it’s colored the experience for me in an irreparable way. I imagine that many of my readers might have the same experience. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do this, but I’ve dusted this old thing off for the occasion:

Now I can put this to rest and hopefully move on to something I’ll feel better about.

Pros: I wish I could think of something snarky to put here, but I’ve run dry.

Cons: Oh, I don’t know, it sexualizes little girls?

Grade: NO