Suzuka Nagami is a beautiful third-year middle school student who has excellent grades and is the student council president. She wrote a novel about a little sister who dotes on her older brother, and the the novel wins a light novel award. After they discuss the matter, her older brother Yū is the one who debuts as a proxy light novel author instead of Suzuka, under the pen name Chikai Towano. – ANN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 10
Source: Light Novel
Episode Summary: Yu has aspired to be a light novel author most of his teenage life, but his contest submissions never seem to make it to the finalist stage. After another rejection email, he looks up the winning entry – a story about a sister who harbors feelings for her older brother. Yu files the information away for later use (it might be a decent read, after all).
In the meantime, his sister Suzuka (with whom he has a strained relationship) begins to act as though she has some news to share with him. Finally he gets her to cough it up – she was, in fact, the winner of that writing contest, having submitted a manuscript that she just happened to write on a whim. With that blow to his confidence out of the way, Yu ends up undertaking a difficult challenge; Suzuka can’t make public appearances as an author for various reasons, so she ropes Yu into becoming the public face of her writing.
Impressions: This series is already infamous for its issues with off-model animation. While I don’t like to go into viewings with preconceived notions about the episodes I’m reviewing, I would have had to have lived the last 3 months under a rock to avoid the commentary about how much of a disaster My Sister, My Writer has turned out to be. I’ll try to keep my opinions as uninfluenced as possible, though, because dumpy animation quality isn’t always the marker of a “bad” anime series.
One of the early scenes in the episode is taken almost wholesale from Sister Princess, a light novel-turned-game and anime from the early 2000’s where a milquetoast player avatar spends his days in a home with 12 little sisters who can can care for (or woo, depending on the sister and situation). I vaguely recall this being a “big deal” as far as anime culture of that time was concerned; this was around the time that moé entertainment was starting to become a known concept in the West, and the incestuous overtones of this property in particular created its own brand of controversy. Nowadays “little sister” stories are as common as mecha anime once was, with every minor story variation having been explored in excruciating detail. Yu, as an aspiring light novel author, has thus far avoided that genre in his own work, but in a dizzyingly meta twist of fate, his future as an “author” (in several sets of quotes) depends on his ability to accept “little sister” stories (or at least pretend to).
The meta angle is ultimately what this series seems to be aiming for, as nearly all the characters we meet in this episode display a lot of insider industry knowledge about what makes light novels sexy, and therefore popular with readers. I talk a lot about cynicism in anime and how it’s a big turnoff for me, but I don’t always explain in great detail how that typically manifests. This episode is a good example in action, though; the characters come across as world-weary know-it-alls with all the answers about popular books. They are less representative of human beings, and more like human-shaped infodump vessels manifested in the form of sexualized moé archetypes. As Yu gleans from them what “sells” in the publishing world, we experience our own attempted sales manipulation via several styles of pretty and available young women draped across the screen. It might be clever commentary if it weren’t so directly insulting to the intended viewing audience.
Speaking of insult, this production seems to do whatever it can to visually undermine the credibility of its characters in any way possible. One thing I used to notice a lot more in the past was the tendency for anime to undermine its female characters through unflattering camera angles and nonsensical fanservice. It may not be that this has diminished, but I tend not to notice it as often (and I’m not letting myself finish anime series that make a habit of this sort of thing). One example that comes to mind from an otherwise okay-ish anime series is Macross Frontier, which seemed to have a direct investment in presenting the outspoken Sheryl Nome in compromising, sexualized poses and partially-dressed states. To me this comes across as a statement – this woman might have a “smart mouth,” but she’s still available to the audience, who ultimately has all the power in the transaction. This is true for every piece of media, obviously; the characters are made-up by human beings and are made to behave a certain way. They don’t have agency. But some properties make it a point to take advantage of this to (perhaps inadvertently) further some kind of regressive social agenda, and that’s where I take issue. As for this episode, there’s a nasty scene that takes place in a bookstore, where the “totally 20-year-old” Esaka is explaining popular light novel tropes to Yu, while the camera lurks behind her for a low-angle creep shot of her underwear. It’s a type of mean-spirited subterfuge that seems to crop up in anime where there’s a lack of confidence in the veracity of its other major aspects (you know, storytelling and visuals).
There’s an overwhelming sense that the women in this series (including the female lead) are all just tools for the education and betterment of the male lead. Shinozaka, Yu’s new editor, puts herself directly in service of his “genius,” offering her body to him for the purposes of his sexual research (because he’s an inexperienced virgin, after all). Suzuka sacrifices her own potential future success as an author (due to some contrived short-term consequences to her family life and public image) so that Yu can become the public face of their collaboration. She becomes a victim to her own (highly unrealistic, I might add) incestuous affections towards her brother, her upstanding intelligence at school just an obstacle in the way of her ill-advised lust. The ways in which the few women we’ve met seem to want to throw away all self-respect in order to devote their time and energy toward a guy who’s not really interested seems to reveal some poor opinions about women by the individuals in charge of the production. Not exactly laudable, in my opinion.
And yes, there’s the animation. Before I watched the episode I assumed that the screenshots floating around were, as they tend to be, cherry-picked from weird in-between frames throughout the episode. The reality is that the characters’ faces look measurably different in almost every scene where they appear. I can only imagine the working conditions surrounding this series – poorly-scheduled, rushed, and without resources to correct for consistency. I think anime like this, in which part of the appeal is probably the “cute” characters, probably relies a lot more on avoiding these types of problems than some serious literary anime, so it’s kind of a shame that I can’t even confidently say “well at least the series looks good.”
I feel bad for this anime, not because I think that the story could have been good – I think there are too many thematic issues for that. It’s more because I get the impression that people put some work into it and everything just kind of went wrong. It’s rough to feel as though animators’ blood, sweat, and tears are being siphoned into a product that will never reflect that hard work, but that’s exactly the feeling I get from this episode. It’s just kind of a no-win situation.
Pros: It was not as bad as that pedophile housemaid anime!
Cons: Rough animation, cynical characterization, and weird fanservice.
Grade: D