Digest: Eromanga-sensei, Gabriel Dropout, and Miss Kobayashi's Maid Dragon

Another three mini reviews packed in one post. I’m looking at these in ascending order of how much I liked them. (Spoiler alert: none of them blew my mind.)

Eromanga-Sensei

Like a weird confetti of tired tropes from comedy anime of the period 2006-2010, Eromanga-sensei exploded onto the scene and proceeded to divide everyone. Oreimo author Tsukasa Fushimi basically decided to redo that problematic series by focusing on a pair of characters who seem like they stepped out of one of the many inane anthology tales of sibling incest that populated the background of the later Oreimo novels.

Did that sound like the sort of snooty highbrow film critic who rages at The Avengers for being propaganda of a fascist patriarchy but praises Sucker Punch for its artistry beyond the purview of the plebeian? That’s how Eromanga-sensei makes me feel. I couldn’t even finish the second episode. I made it 15 minutes in, but really, it had lost me the second that girl started talking about how much she loves dicks. It’s not because she’s in middle school, though that’s bad enough, but because of how brazenly incompetent it was. Instead of the fun of an elaborate, bizarre setup like the Twister scene with Nadeko or the toothbrushing scene with Karen in Nisemonogatari, this girl just shows up on our hero’s doorstep and proclaims, apropos of nothing, that she loves dicks. Eromanga-sensei uses all the tropes I used to enjoy in Haganai, Bakemonogatari, Saekano, and Oreimo itself, but it uses them artlessly. It’s like someone wants a cake and you just throw eggs, milk, flour, butter, and sugar in their face.

The setup manages to be both pedestrian and too strange to produce any real emotional connection: Masamune Izumi is a teenage light novel author. His illustrator is a mysterious person known as Eromanga-sensei who turns out to be Sagiri, his cute loli sister who hasn’t come out of her room since their parents died a year ago. The whole situation reads like Tsukasa Fushimi asking for a do-over on Oreimo. This time, the siblings aren’t blood-related, so a full incest ending is permitted. Fushimi apparently didn’t realize that the incest parts of Oreimo were the worst parts; the best parts of Oreimo were the parts where Kyousuke and Kirino were establishing a relationship as siblings, as family, not when they were doing weird incest stuff that seemed to come out of nowhere.

The only reason I even turned on the second episode was that I felt like I owed it to Fushimi to give the show a chance to develop. Then Dick Girl started in and it lost me. I only kept going for another fifteen minutes because I felt I owed Fushimi the benefit of the doubt. Then I realized that I don’t owe Fushimi anything, not even the benefit of the doubt, not after what a colossal pile of crap the later parts of Oreimo were. I don’t know why Fushimi even bothered writing anything well in the first place if the end goal was always contrived sibling incest, but it seems clear watching Eromanga-sensei that Fushimi and I have entirely different ideas about what the problems with Oreimo were, and Fushimi’s true vision for the series is something I have no interest in watching.

Gabriel Dropout

Gabriel is an angel who was top of her class in angeling school. For some reason, all angels in her world have to go to Earth and attend human high school after they finish angeling school. Once Gabriel reaches Earth, she discovers online gaming and becomes a worthless loser who lives on a pile of garbage and only comes to school when her demon friend, Vigne, bugs her. Gabriel also attends school with Satania, a put-upon demon with delusions of evil grandeur, and Raphiel, an angel whose soft demeanor conceals a love of manipulation and cruelty.

Gabriel Dropout is basically a wacky comedy with a dash of cute girls doing cute things, similar to Anne Happy but with better writing. The concept is the usual out-there weird anime concept and there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it, but the show pulls off some good jokes in its first few episodes. The idea that online games are such a noxious force that they can even corrupt someone as pure as Gabriel was is fun, and there are some good scenes with Satania, although nothing we haven’t seen before. I would’ve liked it if we’d kept exploring the first impression we get of Satania, as someone who wants to be evil because her culture tells her to, but just doesn’t have any head for it and can’t help being good. Instead she becomes a reasonably standard misfortunate oblivious hothead character who declares herself the main character’s rival.

My favorite scene so far was probably the extended coffee shop joke. I was starting to feel sorry for that poor coffee shop owner guy, and the finale of the joke employs Vigne perfectly.

Miss Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon

Of the three shows in this post, this was by far the best. Like Gabriel Dropout, it uses one of the usual out-there weird anime concepts. Kobayashi-san is a put-upon programmer (she writes Python) who lives alone. One night she drinks too much and meets a dragon, who moves in with her as a maid after she drunkenly tells it they can live together. The dragon, Tohru, is obsessively in love with Kobayashi and wants to be with her above all despite being an immortal being with earth-shattering magic. (Per usual in anime like this, she can use her magic to take on a human form, but she can’t get rid of her horns, giant tail, or freakish yellow eyes with red highlights and cat-like slit pupils.) Soon, a young child dragon, Kanna, has also moved in with Tohru and Kobayashi, and two of Tohru’s dragon friends, the dark bishounen Fafnir and the boob character Quetzalcoatl (yes, they made Quetzalcoatl female. Start your rants about the disrespect and cultural appropriation shown by diverging so sharply from the original Aztec mythology), known as Lucoa for short, have inserted themselves into Kobayashi’s everyday life.

The series hits most of the beats you’d expect. The side characters all have one joke that they repeat every time they appear. The later episodes start to drag a bit with the usual plots where everyone performs in a play / celebrates Christmas / plays dodgeball at the park / whatever while doing their one joke. But the earlier episodes, and even certain subplots of the later episodes, have surprisingly well executed slice of life stories about the main trio of Kobayashi, Tohru, and Kanna that let us get to know them as characters. Some stories are about pleasant everyday things, like when Kanna gets disappointed that Kobayashi can’t attend her sports day festival, causing Kobayashi to realize that Kanna sees her as a mother and work late hours so she can get a day off to come. Sometimes we get a taste of the culture gap between the magical dragon world and the human world. That culture gap is frequently played for comedy, but sometimes we also get a real, thoughtful moment from it, such as Tohru’s reflection on the difference between humans in her world, who hate and fear dragons (and are hated and feared in turn), and Kobayashi’s world, where humans have accepted her. Every time I started to think a clichéd dramatic scene was going on for too long, it stopped, showing an admirable control of tone and timing.

As we discover, Tohru is actually a villain, so most of the best jokes come from her quick resort to violence. She’s grave and vicious with her violence, rather than the gleeful careless destruction that’s common among harem anime characters. She fully understands the seriousness of the havoc she wants to wreak, which makes it even funnier when she plans to kill someone over a relatively minor matter.

On that note, I’ll end with this GIF:

An Alternate Interpretation of “Let It Go”

The song “Let It Go” from the Disney film Frozen has often been interpreted as a generic paean to banal ideas like “be yourself” and “let the real you shine through”, but it is entirely possible that, if one really examines the lyrics closely, it has a different and far more sinister interpretation. Consider that Queen Elsa, the character who chants these lyrics at our children, is both the absolute monarch of a small nation and inexplicably disgruntled, secretive, and able to wield superhuman powers, and we gain a picture of her as a radical leftist with an anti-democratic philosophy, an inherent hatred of free markets, and deep hostility towards men (as seen in her treatment of Prince Hans).

If we consider “Let It Go” with this interpretation of the character in mind, we see that the song actually represents the moment Elsa decides to reveal herself as a fascist, anti-corporate, anti-gun, man-hating dictator, ruling by the power of her magic and the fear and complicity of a people cowed by endless winter and barely able to feed themselves from the infertile, snow-covered land that Elsa has created. Let’s examine the song.

The snow glows white on the mountain tonight.
Not a footprint to be seen.
A kingdom of isolation, and it looks like I’m the queen

Elsa notes here that Arendelle has become diplomatically and culturally isolated since her father died, similar to authoritarian Communist dictatorships such as Cuba and North Korea, and that she is now the queen and unchallenged ruler of this “hermit kingdom” (except for the threat of Anna’s future suitor; Anna herself is pliant and easy to manipulate, but a suitor could pose a challenge to Elsa’s rule, which is why she rejected Prince Hans so stridently).

The wind is howling like this swirling storm inside
Couldn’t keep it in, heaven knows I tried

Elsa comments that she’s tried these past few years to uphold the values of her nation, in word if not in spirit, but she finally reached a point with her coronation where she realized that with her father dead, she could allow her own anti-democratic tendencies to come to the fore.

Don’t let them in, don’t let them see
Be the good girl you always have to be
Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know
Well, now they know

Elsa describes the mindset she took to hide her authoritarian persuasion and sexist tendencies: by refusing to “let them in” or “let them see” her true hatred for freedom and for men, and playing “the good girl” that she “always ha[d] to be”, a good girl who would never shut down commerce, tax the job creators, and throw out competent male advisors in favor of corrupt, incompetent ones who either happen to be female or are weak and yielding enough to act as rubber stamps for Elsa’s policies. She tried to conceal her true desires, and avoid feeling them or showing any sign of them, but her authoritarian leaning has become obvious, and “now they know”.

Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let go
Turn away and slam the door

Elsa has resolved to “let it go”. She uses this phrase with two different meanings in this passage. In the first, she follows with “Can’t hold me back anymore”, signifying that she is now going to let “it”, her militant left wing matriocratic ideology, loose upon the people she rules, grinding them down under her radical feminist bootheel. In the second, she follows with “Turn away and slam the door”, signifying that she is going to let Arendelle’s constitution, crafted by the Founding Fathers to uphold democracy, freedom, and property ownership, “go”, “turn away” from it, and “slam the door” on it.

I don’t care what they’re going to say
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

Elsa knows her people will murmur with disquiet when she begins dismantling the protections of the Bill of Rights by taking away their guns, subjecting them to illegal searches and seizures, and curtailing their free speech. However, she will ensure they have no power to fight back by letting the storm rage on, destroying their property and the ability of the land to feed them. This won’t affect her because she will send jackbooted thugs to collect what little food the people do produce as taxes, so the cold will never bother her, anyway.

It’s funny how some distance
Makes everything seem small
And the fears that once controlled me
Can’t get to me at all

“Distance” is metaphorical; Elsa now considers herself a higher being, above all others, atop a pedestal from which she looks down at everything, which now seems small. The fears that once drove her to maintain democratic rule and a nodding relationship with the Constitution can’t get to her at all.

It’s time to see what I can do
To test the limits and break through
No right, no wrong, no rules for me
I’m free

Elsa now intends to start undermining the democracy that her family upheld for generations, and to see how much she can get away with. She’ll test the limits by first using pseudo-legal measures such as executive orders and shady backroom deals with private sector apostates and Big Charity to achieve her far left extremist agenda, but when those prove insufficient to continue her march towards militant lesbian autocracy, she’ll “break through” and use force and direct coercion to achieve her ends. Elsa believes she is beyond primitive notions of good and evil and can do whatever she wants because there is no right or wrong or any rules for her. In so declaring, she also implies her agenda to use her cult of personality to set herself up as a god, destroy all churches, make practicing the Christian religion illegal, and establish death camps for any Christian who refuses to give up their beliefs and set Elsa as a false idol in the place of the one true God and His only begotten son, our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

Let it go, let it go
I am one with the wind and sky
Let it go, let it go,
You’ll never see me cry
Here I stand and here I stay
Let the storm rage on

Elsa’s secret police will have eyes everywhere searching for dissenters. The secret police’s network of spies and informants will be so expansive that it will gift Elsa with near-omniscience, as if she were “one with the wind and sky”, and so able to be everywhere and see everything. This will ensure that you never see her cry, and also that she will continue standing and staying exactly where she is, because any action by her people which might cause her to cry or endanger her position will be swiftly rooted out and squashed due to the omniscience afforded her by her secret police and monitoring system.

My power flurries through the air into the ground
My soul is spiraling in frozen fractals all around
And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast
I’m never going back, the past is in the past

Elsa realizes that she has even more power than she thought now that her militant fascist attitude has combined with her ice powers. She has suddenly become aware that she has the power to execute a pogrom of white men among her advisors and bring in transgender Muslims to fill those positions and plan a genocide of white heterosexual men among the general population.

Let it go, let it go
And I’ll rise like the break of dawn
Let it go, let it go,
That perfect girl is gone
Here I stand in the light of day
Let the storm rage on
The cold never bothered me anyway

Elsa is going to rise like the break of dawn and stand in the light of day, having left the darkness, and lay her intentions bare, declaring her intention to repeal democracy, suppress dissent, and create a police state ruled by militant lesbian leftist kleptocrats, with herself as grand despot, ruling over Arendelle with a cult of personality based on her godhood. Revealing this to the outside world will cause a political storm as her own people and other countries oppose her, but she can weather this storm since “the cold never bothered me anyway”. This is an ironic metaphorical callback to her earlier literal statement about creating a storm to destroy her people’s ability to feed themselves or engage in any economic activity not sanctioned by her corrupt cabinet of anti-male anti-hetero transgender lesbian socialist Muslim suicide bombers.

Conclusion

Queen Elsa represents a threat to American democracy. She is determined to turn all of our daughters and as many of our sons as possible into man-hating transgender socialist Feminazis and to create a world in which it is illegal to own a gun or a business and heterosexual white men are interned in death camps where they are forced to either submit to gender reassignment surgery or die in the gas chamber while their wives have sex with blacks and Jews outside.

The only way to stop this travesty is to fight back against Queen Elsa and her servants, the Disney Corporation, by making our own children’s movies that teach real American values, such as gun ownership, the natural dominance of white alpha males over women and other pathetic men with small penises, beating up egghead dorks who are into science and have small penises, and a view of God as the ultimate alpha male with the largest penis of all. Only then will we be able to take our children, and our country, back from the socialist lesbian genocidal maniac with ice powers known as Queen Elsa.