Courting Controversy – A Look at “Interspecies Reviewers”

Oddly un-sexy at times and burdened by several other issues, but a fascinating example of ecchi anime with decent production values, a great sense of humor, and an unorthodox focus.

Streaming: N/A (Formerly on Funimation; AnimeLab in Australia and New Zealand continued to stream the remainder of the series. The show is now licensed in the US by Right Stuf with an upcoming disc release).

Episodes: 12

Source: Manga

Check out my first impressions here!

Note: some elements of this review may be considered NSFW. This review also contains many general and some specific spoilers for the series.

These past few months I’ve been on a quest to get my anime groove back. Typically I don’t have trouble watching several episodes of a series at a pop, but for reasons that I’ve explained probably too often by now these days are anything but typical. And now, after a couple of anime seasons, my anime queue is looking pretty daunting (luckily there are websites to help one keep track of these things…). For me, having too much to do is a paralyzing feeling that creates more problems than it addresses, so sometimes it pays to stop being analytical and just dive face-first into something ridiculous.

For me, “ridiculous” has always been the marker of something I probably wouldn’t want to watch under normal circumstances, but which might serve as a good palate-cleanser. Years ago I made a habit of watching anime that was distinctly outside of my wheelhouse or even actively irritating to me, just as a way of level-setting and reminding myself of the general competency level of the majority anime. At some point I came to the realization that I was spending a lot of my time watching anime I didn’t really like and getting angry about it, with the added negative side-effect being that my voicing my opinions about gross fanservice or whatever tended to garner a fair amount of abuse; an added burden that I wasn’t emotionally ready to deal with. I can’t say that I was the most eloquent writer back then (nor am I now), but getting told to kill myself just because I didn’t appreciate an overabundance of anime tiddy in my face never seemed like much of an equivalent exchange for the level and reach of my work. At some point it was no longer worthwhile to feel crappy on both the front and back end of an anime viewing, so I decided to focus more on anime that I enjoyed watching.

Friends, I’m coming to you years later having learned a lot about myself and the world of media, and what I can say is that, while life is sweeter when you spend your days doing only what makes you happy, after a while the experience begins to feel stagnant. I recently finished watching the live-action TV series “The Good Place,” and without spoiling too much of the plot one of the lessons the characters learn is that even Paradise itself becomes dull when there’s no end to the day-in-day-out bliss. Heck, even “The Matrix” suggested that human beings are inherently suspicious of too much perfection; it’s life’s little annoyances and downturns – the missed trains, the scraped knees, the inclement weather – that add dimension to our experiences and help construct our reality. So too it is with frustrating anime that grates on the nerves; sometimes it’s the series with small (or large!) problems that help one form a more complete appreciation for the medium.

Interspecies Reviewers is such an oddity that despite being outside my typical tolerance levels in many ways I felt compelled to at least watch a few more episodes. I admit, some of what drove this odd compulsion was the anime’s dismissal from Funimation’s online service; knowing some of the other material that Funi and other streaming services have graciously shared with us over the years, it seemed odd that this one would have crossed some ill-defined line (especially in its more visually-censored form). I know that there are complicating factors – anime is getting to be “big-time” entertainment in a way that it hasn’t been in the past, and Funimation has a big, mainstream parent company to please – but there’s definitely no shortage of fanservice or ecchi comedy material available on their website at this very moment. And, to be honest, the subtitle translation was clever from what I had already seen in the first episode (and I hear the dub was also pretty good), and it was clear there was a lot of effort being made to present the show in its best light, so to wipe it from the website with no warning and a vague statement was a bit of a shock to me (though I’m not going to spend any time vilifying them for it because I’m sure the situation is more complicated than people would like to believe). It’s because of this that I ended up having to “sail the high seas” of the internet to procure some personal copies of the remaining episodes (apologies to folks that are bothered by this – it’s not my preference, either).

I finished the series a couple of weeks ago now and the overall impression it left on me was that, for what it’s worth, it actually did a lot of things well. In addition to the surprisingly good quality of the animation, the series maintains an interesting balancing act between featuring some very graphic sexual imagery and using creative visual symbolism for the things that just can’t be shown on broadcast TV (usually male genitalia). There’s a particularly memorable scene late in the series involving a succubus and a “mayonnaise bottle” that does a great job of letting the viewer know exactly what’s happening without showing any verboten genitals or body fluids. There are also moments that are exceedingly blunt, such as when an extremely-aroused female takes a flying leap at a glass partition, leaving a juicy smear on its surface in the area one might expect. The show doesn’t leave much to the imagination unless it has to, and in a way that’s kind of refreshing. Instead of fading to black after the characters enter a brothel, there’s some care taken to explain (and sometimes show) the mechanics of engaging in intercourse with the various species they patronize. While I didn’t find most of the material to be personally “exciting,” I’m of the belief that the “nature documentary” style of the presentation in many situations is what kept me engaged with the material.

Human (and demi-human) sexuality is rarely an entirely straightforward topic of discussion however, and despite the framework of this series being focused on these interactions there are a ton of social issues worth discussing. While there’s an argument to be made that the sexual transactions in the series are consensual (which I’d agree with – when the characters pay for sex with sex workers, the situations are pretty cut-and-dry, even when the point of a particular brothel is to fulfill the customers’ rape fantasies), there are still some moments that are uncomfortable and gross. The main meeting point for the characters is a pub, which is where they plan their conquests and post their reviews of the different brothels. It’s also where Meidri, a bird woman waitress, works. I mentioned in my episode 1 review of the series that, assuming one has some empathy for Meidri, there are certain situations that definitely read as uncomfortable, and that continues unabated deeper into the series. Aside from the fact that Stunk and Zell, the two protagonists, deal out some low-grade sexual harassment to her on a regular basis (par for the course for many anime, unfortunately), there’s an episode part way through the series that dials up the harassment in an especially unsettling way. The characters go to a golem or puppet brothel, with the gimmick being that the patron can design the sex golem in any image imaginable, including using real people as templates. The characters design theirs to look like Meidri, interacting with her doppelganger in ways the real Meidri would never approve of. The punchline, of course, is that Meidri discovers this, gets understandably angry about it, and doles out her typical punishment (beating the guys’ asses).

The episode left me considering its implications long after the fact; it was after watching it that I took a several week break from the series to collect my thought and consider whether or not I felt like continuing on. My initial gut reaction was toward how distasteful and upsetting the situation felt to me. I think there’s a lot to be said for how portraying things in fiction that would be bad or illegal in real life doesn’t technically hurt any real humans. The characters in an anime are just pictures on a page; nothing bad is really happening to a person. At the same time, though, people like me who have very strong feelings and tend to connect with characters can sometimes feel trauma on their behalf (I realize that sounds over-dramatic; essentially what I mean is that watching a character feel pain is emotionally painful in a certain way, though not obviously in a firsthand way). For me, there’s less separation between the story and the self, and this is where Meidri’s particular situation starts to bother me. I think if you asked most people about it, they’d be uncomfortable if someone made a sex doll specifically in their likeness. Similarly, if some bad actor used digital technology to graft their likeness into a pornographic situation (something that unfortunately happens sometimes), I suspect most people would cry foul. It would feel like a violation – a misrepresentation of that person’s free will manifested in a way that, at least in our culture, is especially upsetting and potentially socially damaging. To me, the men’s treatment of Meidri reads a lot like those sorts of things, and it’s difficult not to empathize with her very justifiable anger. That, plus her hostile work environment that subjects her to fairly constant sexual harassment, is one of the series’ more obvious negative aspects.

What’s interesting is that the series introduces another scenario in which the person whose images are being used is an entirely willing participant. Archmage Demia, and extremely powerful sorceress, has established a magical metropolis where folks can pay a sum of money and then spend three days with a magical copy of herself. Over those three days the customer is free to do whatever they wish with the clone – go on dates, study magic, engage in sexual activity, or even abuse or harm the doppelganger, as is their will. At the end of the session, the clone disappears, completing the transaction (until next time!). It’s interesting to me how the series features these two similar situations, and yet doesn’t necessarily attempt to connect them in any concrete way (the second scenario seems to have been used more to feature Demia as a character rather than to comment on anything in particular). Yet I think the series accidentally stumbles into making an interesting point about the expression of humankind’s more non-ethical urges in ways that ensure no real people are harmed. While I’m not that interested in focusing on that subject much here for various reasons, put simply I think there are socially-abhorrent compulsions people have that arise through no fault of their own, and which might be better controlled if they were allowed both some counseling and a safe outlet that doesn’t hurt real people.

I think the reaction to media with this type of subject matter will always be a push-and-pull struggle between fans who consume media in different ways. There are many media viewers who can experience enough of a separation between what they watch and how they feel about it, that the distasteful things that happen in a fictional setting will always exist in a space outside of the real and the personal. For me, though, when I watch something I’m also having a constant internal discussion – what is this piece of media saying to the audience? Whose point-of-view does it represent? What can we infer about the author’s or creator’s viewpoint from their creation? How does it make me feel? Media doesn’t sprout forth from nowhere, magically free from society’s baggage; it’s the product of an author’s mind and a creative team’s choices. For example, I find it telling that the story primarily centers two men and their sexual adventures, where the transactions are mostly one-way (the genuine succubi and their energy-draining qualities notwithstanding). I find it telling that Crimvael, an angel who possesses both male and female genitalia but who reads as male to the protagonists feels it necessary to protect the secret of their female anatomy, lest they become an unwilling victim of the men’s insatiable sexuality (as if this were a given and a throwaway gag and not a grotesque potential violation). I find it telling that there are several voyeuristic moments spent with Meidri sprinkled throughout the series, in a way including her on the list of conquests despite her being clear that she wants nothing to do with the men’s special review project. Very telling.

But why focus on “controversy” when titling this review, especially when that tends to invite negative attention? To be honest, that’s the aspect of this series that I find most fascinating – my personal feelings of ambivalence toward the material, as well as the odd balance between its highs and lows. Most of the sexual material in the series is consensual and occurs through the patronage of legal sex work. The sex workers themselves are shown to be enthusiastic about the work they’re doing (or, at worst, kind of like “well, this is the daily grind” which I suppose happens when you’re a long-lived species with a job to do). The camera work and type of nudity that’s shown is definitely skewed to one side of the spectrum of attraction, but that’s more a consequence of its target audience not something I’m considering the show’s biggest problem. And, for real, I’ve seen more vulgar, offensive (though perhaps not as straightforwardly pornographic) material in anime series that are still freely available in legal form. And yet, despite its ability to present typically taboo subject matter in a direct way, the story is still brought down by choices that don’t do justice to its characters and play into some of the more upsetting tropes of other fanservice anime. I believe I can think of some song lyrics that put this more poetically than I’m able to:

I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter

-Linkin Park

What’s always been interesting to me is our propensity as passionate fans of a medium to want to take “all-or-nothing” stances when it comes to certain types of content. It’s definitely the M.O. of certain individuals who like to grind out content constructed piecemeal from out-of-context sounds bites and bad-faith arguments. I’m sure by taking umbrage with the show’s treatment of Meidri and, to a lesser extent, Crim, there are some people who’d accuse me of being sex-negative or prudish (definitely not the case!). Instead, I find this subject to have a ton of nuance that seems to be so rarely addressed in a forthright way. Sexuality is as complicated and individualized as almost any other subject; as often as it’s used to facilitate a connection between two or more humans, it’s utilized as a tool of abuse – and in this imperfect world both types of acts could be perpetrated by the same person. Similarly, an otherwise enjoyable anime series that gets many things right can easily contain material that gets other things very, very wrong; to dig in one’s heels and claim otherwise is to ignore the power that media has to reflect the imperfections and contradictions of the human mind.

Which I suppose brings us back to watching imperfect, “palate-cleansing” anime. I think my major take-away is that there’s an eternal balance to be managed between spending one’s time on pure enjoyment and reminding oneself of media pitfalls through media that doesn’t quite get it all right. While watching something excellent can be genuinely euphoric, messy stories with problematic elements can often be just as thought-provoking for a viewer who’s willing to dig through a little doo-doo in the process. This isn’t to say that people should power through offensive material “just because,” but for those of us with the luxury of some time and a fairly strong stomach, a good-faith viewing of something we’re sure isn’t to our tastes can still have plenty of value.

Do I think the majority of people reading this should seek out Interspecies Reviewers? To be honest, I think it would be a betrayal of my focus as a reviewer to say that. I had some fun with it and wouldn’t describe it as wasted time, but I’m not willing to gloss over its many problems and offer a blanket recommendation. But what I would recommend for those folks who are able – those who watch a lot of anime and might feel as though they’re running out of anime they know they’re likely to enjoy – is to seek out and watch a series that you know you’re sure you’re probably not going to like, and to work to identify some aspects of it that are valuable to you in spite of that. It’s not only a good exercise in formulating an opinion, it may open up some unexpected doors to you as an anime viewer.

Pros: Often very funny (especially the OP and ED). Good animation. Interesting focus on the mechanics of intercourse with various fantasy species. Diversity in body types, as well as in what various characters are attracted to. Sex work portrayed in a positive (albeit one-sided) light.

Cons: Some interactions stoop to the level of sexual harassment. POV is very one-sided. The two main protagonists have some generally unsympathetic attitudes.

Content Warnings: Nudity (assuming you’re watching the uncensored version – bare breasts, female and male buttocks, symbolic representations of penises). Sexual harassment in the workplace. Ageism. Dubious consent/sexual coercion. Violence, including sexual (mentioned/described). Voyeurism. Simulated rape scenarios. Non-consensual use of a character’s image for sexual gratification. Fantasy violence.

Grade: C