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:
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