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:

Conception: Mahiru wants you to stop

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: oversexed mascot

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.

Conception: censorship tanukis

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.