Idiots in love


He’s not wrong…

Aho Girl‘s first episode was as annoying as the character herself but the episodes since have improved dramatically, simply by expanding the cast. Yoshiko being an idiot & Akuru punishing her harshly while she professes her love for him was getting old fast by the second sketch; having more people to bounce her off works better and makes Akuru less obnoxious too. When everybody is an idiot, Yoshiko’s own idiocy doesn’t feel like some sort of mental disability anymore. And the new characters are great: there’s her mum, desparate to marry her off to Akuru so her old age will be secure, her teacher trying to teach her something, anything, only to be roped in by her stupidity, the yankee who only wants to be friends with Akuru, the morals officer in love with Akuru who always falls for Yoshiko’s plans to get closer to him, all idiots. With just Yoshiko as an idiot, the series would’ve been cruel: if everybody is an idiot, even our straight man Akuru, it becomes funny.

Tsurezure Children: love is embarassing

Tsurezure Children also has a cast of idiots, but slightly more realistic idiots, as they’re all teenagers in the throws of their first love, unsure about how that whole love thing actually works. It’s an ensemble show, with several skits per episode, so it can be a bit hit or miss. I dislike the rapey student council president and his yankee love interest frex, but at its best this is hilarious, cringe comedy at its finest. Tsurezure Children also does a fine line in heavily blushing school girls (and boys). On the whole it’s a good example of how much you can do to tell a story in only bite sized chunks at a time, doing more than some full length romance series manage over a season.

Gamers: love makes you an idiot

With Gamers, watching the first episode felt like an exercise in predictability. There’s the antisocial loner nerd (also seen in Nana Maru San Batsu who likes video games, who draws the attention of his high school most beautiful and perfect girl, who of course turns out to be a secret gamer herself and who invites him to her newly created games club. And then it surprised me. Because he said no. Instead of getting the usual club story about a rag-tag team coming together to storm the world of competitive gaming, we got a protagonist who just want to play video games for fun and an ever spiralling out of control love pentagon between him, the game club president, the girl he plays his online games with, his normie friend and said friend’s girlfriend, where the relationships get so complicated even the characters have to draw relationship diagrams. Best thing: almost all of it is in their over active imaginations and everything could be resolved if they just sat down and talked to each other… Like Tsurezure Children there’s a lot of cringe comedy here as people behave like idiots and draw the wrong conclusions, leading to some spectacular reaction faces, but there’s also a bit of pathos as people get their hearts broken…

Aho Girl, NTR, Tsurezure Children: First Impression

let’s look at three short length manga based series I’ll probably won’t keep following:

Aho Girl: lots of shouting with few jokes

Aho Girl: an idiot girl shouts until her long suffering, abusive childhood friend snaps again and hits her. That’s the joke. Oh, and she likes bananas. Really really likes bananas. But mostly it’s her shouting nonsense until his patience runs out and he puts her in a wrestling suplex. Having read the manga, this formula doesn’t change much but as other characters get introduced it gets extended somewhat, with Yoshiko’s idiocy rubbing of on others. Problem is that it was never particularly funny. The anime might change that but the first episode didn’t impress.

Netsuzou Trap

Netsuzou Trap: NTR is a trash fetish and adding yuri to it doesn’t change much. Two childhood friends go out for karaoke with their respective boyfriends, when the psycho lesbian one starts molesting our protagonist. It’s all abit creepy and unpleasant, not as enjoyable thrashy as Kuzu no Honkai and not as daring either. That actually had people having sex, here there’s only a bit of light anime style groping on the toilet. Had this been a full length episode, there might have been a bit more build-up of why we should care for these people, but now the boyfriends are just cyphers and the two girls not much better.

Tsurezure Children: love vignettes

Tsurezure Children: like Aho Girl based on a four panel gag comic, this one features the love stories of several teenage couples, from the pure to the blatantly cynical. Problem is, with what seemed like a half dozen couples featured in the first episode and no reason to care for any of them, the actual stories are too slight to care about them. Some of them actively pissed me off in fact, like the somewhat rapey student council president forcing the cigarette smoking deliquent into kissing him. Not my humour.