Epic Zombie rap battles of history:
Anime does have a tendency to mock hip-hop, that fake sort of yo yo bad rhyming your elderly relatives might also do when talking about *condescending sneer* rap music, but this was rather good.
Anime
Japan needs tasty fish is the least of your problems — First Impressions
Congratulations anime! You managed to catch up to early seventies Lois Lane women’s lib stories:
Sora to Umi no Aida is yet another anime based on a mobile game and all it had to do was to translate its gameplay of going fishing in outer space using mythological beings as bait into another cute girls doing cute things show, but instead it went for a sort of pseudo feminist angle. So now it’s 2018 and we have an anime that features a plot seventies DC Comics would’ve found a bit patronising. Women are just as good at fishing in space as men, so let’s make our show undercut its message at every turn by making the women into incompetent harpies. It is painful watching this, seeing time wasted on this asshat when we could’ve had some good yuri going on. I know Japan has a reputation for being ‘backward’ when it comes to feminism but this is absurd.
So the idea is that one day in the future all the fish suddenly disappeared from the oceans and now Japan needs to satisfy its craving for tasty, tasty sushi by fishing outer space fish. It’s a stupid, absurd premise and if this series had glorified more in its stupidity rather than go for some battle of the sexes subplot it might’ve been fun; instead it’s just boring.
My Beelzebub can’t be this cute — First Impressions
Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama presents the biggest mood of 2018:
Fluffy is a good description of Beelzebub, both the series and the titular character, who is an adorable, laid back girl who likes nothing better than to stay in her room to sleep nude in bed surrounded by fluffy animals. She’s also the ruler of Hell in absence of Satan and this gap is causing her assistant Mullin (or Murrin as the audio seems to have it) some problems. To be honest, they’re partially of his own making. If he’s that quick to take offence at seeing Beelzebub naked, he shouldn’t have barged into her bedroom, no matter how late she was for that important meeting.
So that sort of sums up Beelzebub-jou no Okinimesu mama: a fluffy, low energy, relaxing series with a bit of innocent fan service and some sort of romantic plot in the offering between the laid back Beelzebub and her overbearing assistant, all set in a very comfy version of Hell, resembling some 18th century Ruritarian kingdom and feels more like well, Heck at this point. Presumably future episodes will introduce some of the people seen in the opening theme and we get more romances to fill out the story a bit. I rather they do, as I’m not a big fan of the dynamics between Beelzebub and Mullins on display here. The child like ruler who has to be coaxed into doing their duties by their long suffering secretary or assistant is an anime cliche, but it’s a bit dodgy, especially when mixed with romance. Mullins comes over more as a concerned father than a possible lover, while Beelzebub is a complete airhead, who gets her way by pouting and being cute, rather than as a competent ruler of, well, Hell. Having the male underling teach the female ruler her job is never a good look. It’s sort of a mirror to the competent woman make it her life’s work to look after and clean up for the genius bloke who can’t be trusted to look out for himself. It’s infantilising.
So this seems squarely aimed at blokes who like to watch cute anime girls frolic, as long as they’re not too threatening, and who’d also like a little bit of romance mixed in. If I’m honest, I enjoyed the episode but if they do want to push the romance angle, I hope the relationship between Beelzebub and Mullins can be a bit more like that between two adults.
Execution matters more — First Impressions
This is about the only moment in either Conception or Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja Nai that came even close to impressing or even interesting me:
Concern for consent? In my ecchi anime? Well, it’s only an isolated moment but it’s there. And now you’ve seen it, so there’s no need to waste any of your time watching either Conception or Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja Nai. Because these are ecchi anime that fail at everything, too dull to be offensive even though the latter one is yet another sister fucker series. Look, you can say what you want about Eromanga-sensei, last year’s most noticable sister fucker anime, but at least it had a cute ending theme and animation by people who actually seemed to take enough pride in their work to make it fun rather than a slog.
And a slog it was. I didn’t even manage to get to the true fan service in the sister fucker anime it was so dull. A sadsack protagonist, the obligatory otaku useless older brother who wants to write light novels but gets rejected because they don’t have little sister characters and his perfect student president good at sports good at learning good at housework little sister who does win the light novel competition he was rejected for and who –surprise surprise– wrote a story about how this little sister was in love with her perfect older brother and I get tired just writing this. No sense of humour here whatsoever, nothing to leave this deadly dull mashup of cliches. I noped out not long after the scene in which she confessed her win to her brother and asked him to pretend to have written her novel, so apparantly missed the scene in which the adult editor asked him to grope her to learn more about women.
Conception isn’t quite as dull and I actually managed to finish the episode, but I can’t say I paid that much attention to the later scenes either, as this too was shoddily made and cheap, with limited animation and no attempt made to do anything interesting with it. The core idea — dude and his not quite girlfriend/relative get summoned to another world just after she confesses she’s pregnant where he has to fight monsters by making babies with her and a dozen other girls — is roughly as offensive as the sister fucker anime, but worse is how it’s executed. The pregnancy? It’s not his baby, nor actually hers and she never did have sex, it was just a demon who had possessed her or something. So instead of providing any challenge, any plot revelance, it’s just something that happens and can immediately be forgotten and I was a fool to get my hopes up that an ecchi anime would be brave enough to have real teenagers fucking.
Instead they have to be coerced into it to save another world, which is just dodgy even without the cute oversexed mascot thrown in for no purpose other than to be used as censor material when the nookie finally happens. Furthermore, it helpfully explains that the pregnancy will not actually be a real pregnancy: they just need to have sex and the Star child they need to (pro)create will just pop up. Now our hero, slightly less of a sad sack than the sister fucker, just has to get it on with eleven or twelve other girls and they can go home. Not helping the overal dogdy consent issues at play here is that he is shackled and tied to a bed for his physical examination, his *ahem* manly bulge filling about a third of the screen, while some doctor fetish type looks him over. Even that is more dull than it sounds.
Conception is based on a game of the same name, but the sex being necesssary to make star babies is anime original. That they manage to make this dull, lifeless and not at all sexy is an achievement in its own right.
Zombieland Saga — First Impressions
The main concern Zombieland Saga‘s first episode raises:
Rest assured, it doesn’t. Rather, it takes the mickey out of idols shows, in a more teasing than bullying matter. We get introduced to our heroine Minamoto Sakura as this happy go lucky school girl who is going to apply to an idol competition — then gets run over by the ever dependable truck-kun. Cue opening credits as she’s tossed up in the air. It’s a sequence that’s just on the right side of funny and offensive, neither gross for the saking of being gross nor going for fan service. A good sign.
When Sakura wakes up, it’s dark and stormy and she’s in a classic horror house surrounded by …ZOMBIES! It’s only once she escapes and runs into a police officer and he shoots her that she realises she herself is a zombie too. She’s rescued by her ‘creator’ who introduces her to the other girls and tells her that they’re going to save Saga through the power of local idols. So we got half a dozen or so still brain dead zombie girls as idols, a megalomanical mad scientist as their manager and poor old Sakura as the only sane person in the middle. And their first gig is at a death metal club…
And it actually goes better than expected, as the girls’ zombie screams are close enough to death metal grunts to pass muster and headbanging goes a lot smoother if your neck is already broken… All in all this was an enjoyable first episode, though with the developments at the end it will be interesting to see if the series can keep this up and doesn’t degenerate into a more typical idol show, with the zombie thing just adding a little bit of flavour. Either case, I’ll keep watching, if only for Sakura’s reactions to things.