To be honest, I sort of knew who the Shinsengumi were — late 19th century fascistoid thugs who for some reason are very popular BL fodder — and I assume the Tama river is the one in the background here, so this sort of mangled allusion in my subtitles doesn’t bother me. I’ve watched too much fansubbed anime and read too many scanlations to even notice this sort of thing anymore:
But it is indicative for the quality of the subtitles, when one of the first things you see is an unaltered reference not too many people outside of Japan will understand. It and similar references, as well as a fair few misspellings as well as typeset errors, with words running into each other e.g. showed that whoever had translated this, had done the bare minimum with results barely above machine translation quality. Subtitles which apparently were forced on Crunchyroll by the Japanese distribution company Remow, also involved with last season’s Ooi Tonbo! whose subtitles were not great either. All of which has overshadowed Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan‘s premiere quite a bit. And this for a series with a lot of hype behind it: “the new Lucky Star or Nichijou” it was supposed to be. Now completely hobbled by being too cheap to get proper translators involved.
It all starts when Koshi Torako, former deliquent turned perfect student at a prestigous high school, finds a girl hanging by her antlers from the powerlines at the side of the road. She rescues her and hopes never to see her again but guess who turns up as a new transfer student? Shikanoko Noko — call her Nokotan — makes a devastating impression entering the classroom, but Torako is the only one who finds anything strange. That of course Nokotan sits next to her is bad enough, but she also sniffs out — literally — Torako’s deliquent past. What will this do for her carefully cultivated reputation?
Yes, poor old Koshi Torako — Koshitan as Nokotan immediately calls her — is stuck being the straight man in a zany comedy in which Shikanoko is the agent of chaos ruining her life. A tried and true concept for a comedy anime, but does it work? Not quite for me. It all feels a bit try hard and artificial. There were a few good jokes that landed in this first episode but nothing as funny as the choco cornet discussions that Lucky Star opened with.