Is It Wrong to Enjoy Miss Monochrome in a Dungeon?

The other night, after catching the next episode of Hibike! Euphonium, I went to watch the next Wakaba＊Girl and found that it hadn’t been opened up for non-paying scumbags like myself yet. I still felt like watching a short, so I sought out Encouragement of Climb, of which I saw the first episode a while back. I remembered thinking it was pretty cute, but unfortunately, when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it. Rather, I found an empty page with no videos on it. I found the videos for Season 2, but watching Season 2 when you haven’t seen Season 1 seems pretty pointless.

I was about to give up and go to sleep, but I finally decided, after some deliberation, to watch either Oneechan ga Kita! or Miss Monochrome, both of which I had fairly low expectations for. I ended up watching Miss Monochrome because the video loaded first, probably because I clicked on the link first since it was the first tab in my browser.

I ended up watching the next Miss Monochrome, and yes, even the third one.

I kind of feel bad for liking Miss Monochrome. After all, it’s a total money grab. The character Miss Monochrome was created by voice actress and singer Yui Horie, originally as a virtual idol for one of her concerts. There is no doubt in my mind that Miss Monochrome was created by (a team of artists who did their work while ignoring the occasional email from) Yui Horie, originally as a (cross-media phenomenon like Hatsune Miku, once the concert had done its job of introducing her to hordes of otaku). It’s the otaku equivalent of shows and movies based on lines of toys: associate the character from the outset with a highly popular voice actress/singer, make sure to include every moe element you can think of and also make her an idol, quickly dash off some anime shorts and maybe some yon-koma manga, release singles of music by the character, make Nendoroids, gashapon, plushes, PVC figures, posters, wall scrolls, dakimakura covers—then watch the yen roll in!

But, Godoka-damn-it, I liked the character and I liked the show. I’m a Yui Horie fan. I’ve been a bit of one ever since Love Hina, even though I was never a Naru fan. (I liked Shinobu and Mutsumi, and in the manga I also came to like Motoko a lot.) I became a big Yui Horie fan after Bakemonogatari. Not only did I love the character Tsubasa Hanekawa, I loved Horie’s performance as her. Yui’s voice has such a unique quality to it, yet she uses little tricks of intonation to change from the sarcastic and aggrieved Miharu Takeshita of B Gata H Kei, to the laid-back and big sisterly Tsubasa Hanekawa, to the flashy and energetic Minori Kushieda. And she has big tricks too; who do you think played Riki Naoe in Little Busters? Or Mizuho in Otoboku?

The character Miss Monochrome is an android who decides she wants to be an idol for some reason. In the process, she loses her 19.3 billion yen fortune and recruits Maneo, the manager of the local convenience store, as her idol manager, in her quest to stand alongside Kikuko, a well-known idol. Miss Monochrome is, of course, voiced by Yui Horie, who plays the role with an appropriate flatness, augmented by just the right amount of robot voice effects. Kikuko is voiced by Kikuko Inoue, who seems to be one of the few actresses still around from when I started watching anime. (If I recall correctly, she played Belldandy in the original Ah! My Goddess OVA, which I watched obsessively in my early teens. Nowadays she often voices motherly characters, including Clannad’s Sanae Furukawa.) Miss Monochrome also has a pet Roomba, Ru-chan, who is voiced by Hiroshi Kamiya, who also voiced Monogatari’s Koyomi Araragi, Hiromi Souma of Working!!, and Shinji Matou of Fate/Stay Night. (This almost seems like a Monogatari reference; in one of my favorite scenes in all of the Monogatari series, we discover that Tsubasa Hanekawa says good morning to her foster parents’ Roomba every morning, since she has no one else to greet.)

The stories remind me of Digi Carat. They’re random, absurd, and capitalize on anime and moe cliches left and right. Unlike Puni Puni Poemi or Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, Miss Monochrome doesn’t really try to subvert moe by making the characters psychopaths or having blood and guts flying everywhere. Like Digi Carat, some of them have really terrible personalities, but in the end they’re moe girls, not South Park-style subversions of moe girls.

I had fun watching them. Each episode is about four minutes long, including the standard 1:30 ending song. In those four minutes, many totally random events occur. In Episode 1, Miss Monochrome loses her entire fortune and her wondrous mansion in the space of about thirty seconds, all because she trusted the wrong person. Episode 2 ends with Miss Monochrome discovering Ru-chan dead on her living room floor and burying him in the backyard. In Episode 3, he’s back, and even becomes a flying disc for Miss Monochrome to ride into space to battle aliens in her powered armor. Through all the randomness, and all the terrible things that happen to her, Miss Monochrome stoically soldiers on, undaunted by the cruelty and Pyrrhic victories that lie on the path to becoming an idol. Her manager, Maneo, just accepts the whole situation without question and starts booking idol work for her, even though he’s just a convenience store manager. Maneo seems to know that Miss Monochrome is a terrible idol due to her lack of personality and facial expression, but he tries to sugarcoat things for her, and even gives her rewards for her good work. It’s random, absurd, over-the-top, and oddly sweet.

So there it is. I enjoyed Miss Monochrome, even if it’s wrong. That doesn’t mean I have $467.95 to spare on a PVC statue of her, though.