Today we cover a few more series premieres of the fall anime season. Let's get started:
Tonari no Kaibutsu-kun: I wavered between liking and disliking this episode until the very end, but my conclusion is final. A series like this is simply unacceptable. For the male protagonist to kidnap, assault, sexually assault, and threaten to rape the female protagonist all on the same episode, and for the girl to think this was all somehow okay and like him anyway, is unforgivable. It just sends a bad moral message to the populace at large. If this is how you charm girls, how many girls will fall victim to this manga's advice? It doesn't matter if the boy doesn't 'mean any harm' by it or is somehow air-headed and doesn't understand the implications of his own actions. There's simply no excuse. This guy should be in jail, not charming our heroine. Period.
Code:Breaker: This series is much better, because the male lead only tries to burn to death the female lead in the first episode. This is much more polite and honorable than Tonari no Kaibutsu's heartthrob. Putting that aside, I thought it was an interesting first episode. A little formulaic, but I can accept that. I'm just very worried about the format, one girl surrounded by six extremely badass pretty boys doing whatever together. I didn't realize this was the plot for Arcana Famiglia until too late, but this time I realized it from the beginning -- this is another anime built around satisfying girls' fantasies, and therefore probably won't be in the least interesting to anyone not sexually invested in this format. But this is all surmise. I should wait until I actually dislike the series to dislike it, and watch it until then.
Suki-tte Ii na yo: Okay, seriously, what is with all the series this season? Another girl-fantasy centered story, another guy who sexually assaults the heroine within the first episode -- another girl who finds this charming and lovely, instead of having any objection to it. The moral of the story is that if you are a handsome, cool boy who has high grades, is popular among girls, or is good at basketball, you are allowed to start kissing, grabbing, or molesting any girl you please, no matter how coldly they've treated you until that point and no matter how many times they've rejected you previously, and they'll all be grateful for it and fall in love with you.
There's nothing I have against this series personally. It just has all the routine things I hate about girl-centered manga. Every boy except the male lead is a perverted jerk or creepy stalker/criminal. The heroine has nothing special about her, but the coolest guy in school falls in love with her at first sight. By the end of the first episode, the boy has confessed to the girl and is her love slave, but somehow the story continues from there, even though the plot is already wrapped up and nothing more can possibly happen.
I really feel bad for girls if they think this world is only composed of perverts and criminals who are out to molest them -- and potential cool boyfriends who will sexually assault them at random, but are cool enough that this is a dream come true. Is there no room for a boy who politely says he likes you and thinks you're pretty? Is there no room for a boy asking if it's okay to kiss or touch you ahead of time, or at least waiting until the girl gives some non-verbal cue that should be taken as a go ahead? Is there no room for a boy who can treat you as a friend and keep in reserve whatever sexual feelings he has about you until you're ready for them? Is there no room for a boy who simply isn't interested in you like that?
In Kimi ni Todoke, everything is so much purer. The boy who loves the girl at first sight is polite enough to keep his feelings hidden until he feels they're likely to be requited. Another boy, who's just as cool as the main character, likes the girl as a friend but already is in love with a totally different girl, and would never think to be swayed from his course. A boy who does confess his feelings to the heroine backs off after he realizes he's hurting her feelings by interfering with her relationship with the male lead. Everyone comes off as decent, human, in control of their instincts, and not-in-the-least enslaved by the female lead's attractiveness. And here we have Kamisama, Suki-tte, Tonari, and probably Code:Breaker too all following the same formula of violent, out of control guys falling in love in the very first episode and like cave men simply clubbing the girl they like over the head and dragging her into a cave to mate. And it's not boys writing these stories. It's girls. And it isn't boys enjoying these stories. It's girls. There's something deeply wrong with the female psyche. I mean, this stuff is sick. It's twisted. It's wrong. And it shouldn't be promoted on tv. I don't hate Suki-tte, it has some good points to it, but I think in principle I'm going to swear off shows that promote such bad behavior as kissing without permission a girl you just met a day before.
Humorously, Akaneiro ni Somaru Saka had just such an event, where a guy thinks the girl likes him and kisses her out of the blue. But instead of the girl finding this incredibly charming and swooning for him, she gets extremely angry, yells at him, and starts beating him senseless. Then the guy apologizes over and over across half the series for the misunderstanding. Even then, the guy had had more non-verbal cues that the girl wanted to be kissed than any of the above series, and divine wrath was still visited upon him for his presumption. Now that's a series promoting better behavior.
Another thing, I think a romance story where the boy falls in love with the girl at first sight is extremely lazy. Yes, I know many real life romances have genuinely begun this way. Yes, I know many boys have gone on to marry said girls and their marriages have lasted fifty happy years. But it's still bizarre. It still makes no sense. How can you love someone without even knowing anything about them? What, then, do you love about them? How can you love someone who doesn't share your views on important subjects, doesn't share your hobbies so you can't have any fun together, doesn't care about the same virtues as you do -- and how could you possibly know you're compatible before you even hang out together? Yes, many girls are captivatingly beautiful, so much so that you feel like you could forgive anything if you were just allowed to see her every day. But these feelings are fleeting and cannot be the basis of a long-term relationship. They crumble away at the first difficulty and leave nothing behind. A love story that promotes the fantasy and illusion and trap of love at first sight is also socially harmful, on top of all the other bad precedents these series are setting.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: What a fitting title for this bizarre series. In one episode, it covers the life of two boys from age 1 to 19. And what action packed lives they were! None of it makes any sense. For instance, if a rapist grabs and kisses you out of the blue, that doesn't in any way mean you've betrayed your boyfriend, since you didn't consent to the sexual assault, so why on Earth would you feel guilty about it? At least in this series the sexual assault did not mean that the girl instantly fell in love with her abuser, which I guess is an improvement over all previous series this season. Also, even if you are hit in the head by multiple full strength elbows and jabs, your face still retains its pretty-boy status without a single nick or broken nose. What a miracle! In fact, if anyone were beaten that badly they would fall over dead. It's possible to die from a single punch, but the blows these boys were landing on each other were altogether more brutal than that. Since they don't have superhuman toughness like the characters from Dragonball Z, I just can't understand how anyone survived this first episode.
So here's what we have to do -- forget about human reason. Do not even attempt to understand or analyze why the things that happen in Jojo's Bizarre Adventure happen the way they do. Just sit back and watch, and somehow turn off your brain and just let your eyes watch instead. If you do so, it might be an enjoyable series. After all, it's creative and unpredictable, exciting and action-packed. Just turn off your brain, you can do it! Then you can watch episode 2.
Oniichan Dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankeinai yo ne:
This series is a train wreck. A girl who relentlessly pursues a boy, any boy, who's repeatedly rejected her is just as obnoxious and rude as a boy who does the same to a girl. I don't see why it's cute when a girl does it but stalking when a boy does it. It's evil either way. Also, the introduction of additional characters who literally warped into existence without any introduction and then acted like they'd always been there, and the fact that they all randomly love the male lead for no known reason, is absolutely ridiculous. There is only one good thing about this series, and that is how cute the female lead looks. Unfortunately, I could say that about many, many series, from Arcana Famiglia to Campione to virtually any anime. That's not enough to suffer through all the rest.
Little Busters: The Little Busters anime almost perfectly followed the visual novel. It's a shame about the voice actor changes from the original, since the visual novel was perfect the way it was, but that can be overcome. The animation and art quality weren't stupendous, but they weren't bad either. The characters, plot, humor, and everything else were up to Key standards, which means better than nearly anyone else, automatically. Still, it did feel like a poor introduction to the series. We barely managed to see a few scenes from the visual novel in episode one, and suddenly the episode was already over. The visual novel is much more seamless, you just read and read hour after hour -- but we anime watchers only get to see tiny portions of the story 30 minutes a week. Because of that, it feels a lot more janky than it should.
Here's my point -- Little Busters is everything I hoped for and clearly the best anime this season. But I do not think it was better than the first episode of The World God Only Knows, the first episode of Bakuman, the first episode of AKB0048, or the first episode of the first season of Hayate no Gotoku. For a series that's aiming for the top, to actually be the best anime ever, this wasn't the showing it needed to make. This story is probably a lot slower than those other series, and is going to need more time before it reveals just how great it really is. The same was true of Clannad, which didn't reveal how great it was until the very end of the second season. J.C. Staff promised us Little Busters was going to be a long series. We need to have the patience to let the story develop, to let that length play out, and then enjoy the story in full. This one episode is just a building block for the episodes to come; So if this episode didn't feel special enough, just stay tuned.
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