Summer 2018 First Impressions – Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs

Kogarashi, a high school boy cursed with misfortune to see ghosts since birth, finds a haunted inn offering rent-free room to anyone able to exorcise a ghost. When the ghost turns out to be an innocent young girl, Kogarashi decides to help her move on rather than purify her. While he works on that, Kogarashi is pulled into the paranormal hijinks of the other residents of the inn and even his new school mates. – ANN

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Episode 1 Summary: After living in poverty and without a home for much of his recent life, Kogarashi has finally found an affordable place to hang his hat. After being abandoned by his relatives he spent some time apprenticing with a medium, perfecting his exorcism punch attack to get rid of ghosts and spirits. Now he’s found an inn offering incredibly cheap accommodations, though it’s due to being haunted. With Kogarashi’s skills, he figures it won’t be haunted much longer and he can then live his days there cheaply and comfortably. It isn’t long after his arrival that he encounters the ghost, but he realizes quickly that a psychic punch isn’t going to do the trick this time – the ghost isn’t some terrifying spirit, but a sexy girl his same age named Yuuna. Kogarashi muddles over this conundrum, but his purpose becomes clear when a traveling monk attempts to forcibly send Yuuna to the afterlife. Kogarashi rescues Yuuna and vows to help her ascend to Heaven on her own terms.

Impressions: I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot as of late, but in a lot of ways I feel like some of the anime this season has been a return to the type of content that I remember from my earlier reviewing days. It’s likelier that I just stopped paying attention to certain material as I became less inclined to go out of my way to watch it, but there’s also a part of me that believes in the ebb and flow of fandom tolerance to certain things and this might be just another ebb. In any case, this episode represents what I think is the most straightforward example of a comedy harem series I’ve seen in a while, with all the good and ill that comes along with it.

Before I get into my more personal impression of the content, for those of you who are prone to getting angry when women comment on material made for and marketed at straight men, I’ll just say that this is the show that knows its target audience. This episode is filled with attractive buxom characters overflowing out of their clothing or hidden behind precarious wisps of steam. From the opening animation onward there’s no confusion about the type of sexy hijinks or wacky pratfalls to expect within. To be honest I kind of appreciate that, not only because it keeps me from being caught off-guard by something that doesn’t make me feel very good, but because the show isn’t trying to legitimize itself in some other way by wearing the cloak of something that takes itself more seriously. One thing that bothers me personally is when an anime series puts on airs to come across as gritty, weighty, or artsy, only to then spend time making women into victims or simply showing off their bodies in various ways. In this case, the key art screams “anime tiddy” and that’s truly what you get.

One of my orientation tactics when it comes to this kind of material is based around the relative awfulness of the characters. It seems like, so often, the male lead is either a perverse instigator or a clueless dimwit. Either scenario comes with its own share of frustrations. Kogarashi is an interesting case in that he’s made out to be a sympathetic protagonist almost right away; though he still gets involved in many of the same trashy gags as his anime brethren, both his financial and family situations, as well as his general lack of outwardly-visible malice and immaturity makes him seem more earnest and less disgusting of a human being. He doesn’t seem terrified of the opposite sex, but he’s still nervous about suddenly seeing female nudity, if that makes any sense. Yuuna is a gentle, lonely soul (literally) who really just wants someone to understand her (and maybe not see her naked). The extended cast, however, is a mixed bag of various quirks and issues. Aside from the innocuous innkeeper, there’s also a young woman whose primary trait seems to be cat-like laziness, a very busty woman with an aversion to clothing (or at least clothing that fits, or pants in general), and a black-and-white thinking samurai-type with a tendency towards violent resolutions of minor problems. Not necessarily the group from which I’d want to have to pick a romantic partner, and not exactly representative of most women in any realistic sense. They’re all very one-note and, to me at least, unappealing people. In short, it’s a mixed bag.

Despite Kogarashi’s status as an okay guy there’s still a robust series of contrivances that places him in the path of boobs, underwear, and various other sexualized body parts and articles of clothing. It’s difficult for me to convey just how tedious that type of material is for me to sit through. I made note of something that occurred multiple times throughout the episode which used to get my blood boiling but that I now just find confusing and weird. What that “something” is is the tendency for dialog spoken aloud by women to be accompanied not by images of their faces, but instead by flashes of their cleavage, underwear, or squirming legs. There’s something fundamentally dehumanizing about coupling character dialog with something that’s a sexualized part of that character’s body. It is, in fact, one of the purest forms of objectification, and one that’s used in anime quite a bit due to its added benefit of saving on animation. Have you ever been in a situation where you write down a simple, familiar word, but no matter how you look at it it seems like it’s spelled incorrectly? Nowadays when I listen to dialog and all I see are breasts or upper-thighs, the imagery seems so wrong and abstract that it’s become bothersome to me in an entirely new way. What this tells me is that what the women are saying isn’t important, or that in order for them to exist as sexual fantasies, their status as thinking, feeling entities has to be downplayed. I’m sure most of you out there can identify the fundamental issue with that. And if you can’t… well, I encourage you to think it through some more.

Additionally there’s plenty of accidental boob-grabbing, low-angle panty-gazing, and typical harem-style characterization to last through this and several more episodes, and all of it is thoroughly unsurprising. I think what bothers me most of all, aside from watching Kogarashi become involved in an accidentally sexual situation and be violently punished for it (it happens multiple times from different sources), is the fact that, at its core, this series has a really sweet story about a ghost who’s been unable to let go of the world of the living who finally finds a friend who understands her situation. I think that there’s something potentially poignant buried down beneath the oodles of fleshy cleavage and ecchi situations, but it’s those very factors ensuring that I’ll never stick around to discover it.

I can’t exactly call this episode disappointing because it lived up to every expectation that I had for it. In a strange way, though, it’s kind of nostalgic; it reminds me of my earlier reviewing days when I would get passionately angry about certain types of material and use that fire to keep writing. Nowadays I’m differently-motivated and so these basic, un-creative boob-fests don’t really serve much of a purpose for me other than speed bumps on the way to my destination. As a sex comedy, one could do much worse. As entertainment for folks like me who prefer anime without heavy doses of women’s bare bodies, it obviously doesn’t stack up.

Pros: The episode doesn’t really beat around the bush as far as its content is concerned. There’s a (probably) wholesome core if you’re willing to dig around and ignore certain things.

Cons: There are several examples of characters talking while images of their bodies are shown. There’s a “violence = justice” type of mentality when it comes to responding to Kogarashi’s accidental transgressions.

Grade: D+