Not Recommended
[1/10] _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Oh no. Oh no... I was holding off on publishing a review until I finished watching. Not for any hope that something like this would get better, but simply due to the fact that I couldn't bring myself to write about whatever this is. Eromanga-sensei is everything wrong with the anime industry. And you know what? That's not funny. I see so many jokes about that concept. How viewers laughingly remark about this series' and how horrible it is but eat it up regardless, promoting this utter shit until it becomes the most popular non-sequel of the season. And it is. Eromanga Sensei is the most popularnon-sequel in Japan. Can you believe it? A show about a fourteen year old trying to fuck his twelve year old sister while she molests other twelve year old girls is the most popular program in Japan. It is probably the most popular program amongst western anime fans too. It baffles me. Coming from a western background, series like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad steal that limelight. Sure we have duds like The Walking Dead drifting about with their cable appeal, but even that is understandable to me. At least that has elements of redeemable quality.
Eromanga has none of that. Eromanga is the mutated lovechild of everything that's hate-able about this industry and the sole reason why anime series' won't ever be taken seriously. For every angered fan of anime that realizes that their favorite show or non-ghibli film will never see the light of day in any extended theater run or any major awards show; this is why. Eromanga Sensei is hopefully the worst series I'll watch to completion. That's because as a viewer I've mostly stuck with some of the most popular anime. I've made my way through the highly-touted projects and ignored the seasonal popularity. Well, this is my first time delving deep into it and it yields an unforgettable, but totally forgettable product that fails at even the most basic storytelling.
This will have spoilers. If you are reading this and haven't seen the show, good. Don't watch it. It isn't worth it. It's not funny, or engaging, and the memes you have seen about it don't give a holistic representation of the insane tedium which this show revels in. This show isn't "so bad it's good." Far from it.
Eromanga-Sensei is just fucking garbage.
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[A Dancing Girl and a Pedophile]
This series follows a harem protagonist on a mission to fuck with a plethora of forgettable girl archetypes that you've seen a million times in a million different anime. The girl that he will end up being with is Sagiri, his twelve year old NEET sister who has not left her room in years. He also happens to write shitty light novels, much like the ones this series is based on, and his artist just so happens to be the twelve year old non-blood related sister living upstairs. What a coincidence! And of course he finds out and helps her hide her identity.
Then we meet a few other girls who are also light novel writers and play no role other than to create fanservice scenes that aren't just of the main girl. Honestly, the first ten episodes of this series really don't matter. The eleventh episode provides some much needed backstory which just renders the rest of the series up until that point completely useless. Anyway, Eromanga is just a series of empty husks waddling around on screen. It is a collection of sexual gifs that patrol the internet. From the totally inexplicable character writing to the horrendously boring direction to the non-story that is told throughout this series, Eromanga struggles to get anything right.
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[Visuals]
The visuals are probably the most positive aspect in this series, and even they are incredibly uneven. You see, A-1 hired a unique key animator for Sagiri, the little sister, and only Sagiri. So her animation is often much more fluid than the rest of the characters. This creates an animated whiplash of epic proportions. You go from a well-animated movement to a seizure-like stutter within the same scene. So even if her animation is good, this show has a tendency to skimp out on everything else.
Some highlights are absurdly off-model characters that kind of look hilarious. Really egregious oversights, even in the shows forgettable OP. A-1, like they do, put the minimal effort required into making this show palatable to look at while forgetting to actually give it direction. It looks like any generic as all hell sitcom. Bad.
Every episode is mostly just a compilation of characters sitting around talking exposition for minutes on end before they get to the two minutes of fanservice that peppers the internet for the next few days. They virtually just include the last eighteen minutes for no discernible reason. This could've been just two minutes of soft-core porn and I think the fans would have been just as happy, if not more so, with this series.
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[Sound]
It's bad. The OP is forgettable but not painful, the ED I already forgot. The show has a seasoned atrociousness, as it's unfunny and bland writing is often back-ended by painful background music. Now this ranges from "fat guy walking" tuba to "Squidward playing the clarinet" and it was initially funny that this series had such abrasive background music. But it got tedious really quick and ended up just making me angry by episode four.
What can I say. This show sounds horrible.
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[Characters/Story]
Now lets get to the meat. And by meat, I mean the meat of a bunch of underage girls that are endlessly used as tools to turn on a bunch of creepy fucking virgins watching this series to get off. I get it, it's okay to imagine children naked if they are fake. And i'm a supporter of the notion that thought-crime shouldn't be illegal because it doesn't harm anyone. I don't honestly care what you think about on your free-time and I care even less if it is totally fictitious and not exploiting anything.
So my problems with this series isn't that it sexualizes kids. That's nothing new in anime (as disturbing as that is) and it is far from its biggest fault. It's pedophilic and gross, and I often felt ornery watching this series due to the kind of framing devices it used to express its sexuality. For example, instead of diagetically forcing fanservice on us, the director made the 'brave' choice of literally just having shots of characters from below. It felt like a pedophiles hidden camera every time a character was talking.
Whether the show is being serious and dramatic or light-hearted and unfunny, the fanservice never ends. Character is being cute? Show them being cute with a below-the-skirt shot. Character crying? Have it framed so their still developing tits take up half the shot. It's cringe. It is a repulsive way to shoehorn this nonsense into your show. But on the other hand, this is the only thing this show has going for it anyway. It is riddled with plot-holes and totally clueless characters that defy any logic whatsoever.
In one scene it is established that Sagiri cannot draw girls with big tits. Why? Because she uses herself as a model for all her drawings and she is twelve. So her brother, being the great, enabling guy he is, tells her to look up idols on google to discover how to draw big tits. It works! She can now draw big meatsacks. However, two episodes later she regresses back to not being able to draw titties because... a girl showed her, her panties on skype. Let me get this straight, seeing panties made you unable to draw tits.
But it gets better.
The way she says she can resolve this issue is if her brother literally lures girls into her room and has them show her their panties. Not only is that fucking creepy, but more importantly, how does drawing panties even relate to drawing tits? Why are glaring issues like this not resolved in the initial adaptation phase?!
This would be fine. Well, no it actually wouldn't, but not as bad if it didn't lead to one of the most genuinely disturbing scenes i've seen in anime. Now i'm not one to be disturbed, although I am definitely one to cringe. But her brother does it. He finds a girl and drags her to her room, ties her up and blindfolds her and has Sagiri draw her panties. But get this, Sagiri, the twelve year old girl, rips that other twelve year old's panties off. She literally molests another girl. And it isn't really played as anything either, that girl is genuinely uncomfortable and so was I. Get this. They become great friends afterwards too. Talk about Stockholm syndrome.
I wish this was the only ridiculous inanity that occurs, but it isn't. A character called Elf exists. She has pointy elf-ears for literally no reason. It is never explained or mentioned. She just does. Her characterization is as confusing as she is repulsive. Very much so. She shifts between big-sister-esq and comforting to childish and annoying to a complete tsundere from episode to episode and it makes virtually no sense. She is also a part of our protagonist's harem.
Which leads me to the third character. Muramasa. Who's probably the most well-designed of the bunch, but has the personality of a grapefruit. She's a best selling light-novel author yet it is revealed that she was inspired by our harem protagonist's work ever since she was young. Well, younger. This was an element I guessed the second I saw the character simply because you can't have a character in a harem that is better than the male protagonist. You just can't. This is a power fantasy series for lonely kids and adults that want young girls to flock all over them in their dreams. So you can't have them be worse at anything. You need them to be virtually perfect. And our protagonist is.
These days, i'm developing a blase attitude towards the inherent sexism showed in anime. Which is a bit sad because I do love me a strong female character who "don't need no man". But you know, when the entire medium is marketed towards teenage boys it kind of makes sense to have every male be the best and every women be a toy to be played with. Even if it is obnoxious and kind of distressing.
This show is obviously not any different. In one titular scene we have our protagonist chat with the big brother of Elf, and when he discusses the great things about Elf the only thing he can say is, "She's nice and is a good cook." Wow. What a charmer. And this isn't even played off as a joke, this was a genuine scene with sappy, saccharine music in the background.
This kind of character writing extends throughout the series, too. The character writing is so bad that it feels like our protagonist is maliciously playing with these girls, since he's shown to be so oblivious that it becomes hard to believe. He rejects a girl, but obviously she keeps pursuing him, but then he proceeds to invite her to plenty of social events, as if it won't be awkward as all hell for her. It truly is a baffling kind of attitude.
I get the excuse, too, that he's just a "stupid teenager", and he is. But you know what? Using character stupidity as a plot contrivance isn't good writing. It doesn't make the protagonist or the story any better knowing this dude might actually be handicapped. It just makes it even more frustrating.
We are getting front row seats to this idiot fucking with these girls. And it isn't funny. Whether he understands that he is doing this or not, it's happening, and it is the least funny thing in a show that is already aggressively unfunny. If it was well-written comedy then it could be played as dark humor, but it isn't, it's just a bunch of girls yelling "baka!" really loudly.
To refer back to that scene of our protagonist talking with Elf's brother, who by the way asked him to marry her in that very scene. Get this, marrying a fourteen year old. He says that he would if he wasn't in love with someone else, referring to his twelve year old sister. However, the episode before he actually told the sister he would be with Muramasa if he wasn't in love with 'someone', as he puts it, since he's unable to admit his love of his sister, sometimes. So this entire scene played as a total contradiction, unless the protagonist was supposed to be a total lying scumbag fuck. I don't think that was intended, though.
...
When it comes to script writing this show is a masterpiece. Much like a Michael Bay script, Eromanga has a tendency to describe everything that is shown. I'm not talking about emotions, i'm talking about literally shown. In one scene they are goofing off instead of working, and when the brother of Elf walks in to catch them in the act of goofing off, Elf stands up and literally explains what he is seeing. It is this baffling mixture of having to exposit a moment and also badly adapting dialogue from the light novel.
You are seeing everything she is saying. It isn't even the whole "show don't tell" rule, that doesn't apply. That's a criticism for bad writing. This isn't bad writing. This is like the a new universe of writing. It is so abysmal that it bore it's way out of the crust of her earth and floated off into space. This kind of writing extends to multiple different episodes too, often times characters restate their purpose multiple times and it still leads to nothing. For example, the entirety of episode ten was about how Muramasa loves the protagonist, but that's been established since her second introductory episode. She literally just reuses the dialogue she used that episode. It is a special kind of absurd.
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[Speed Round : This show is shit!]
* After a one-episode tournament-esq arc finishes, there is an after party to which everyone who participated in the competition established gets to come. Elf ends up going, even though she wasn't in the competition and this wasn't addressed at all. It was just an excuse to bring all the girls together.
* Everything ties back to the MC for virtually no reason but to make him the focal point of every characters lives. Every character backstory has something to do with our main character and it might be the most contrived bullshit I've ever witnessed on screen. And I watched the entirety of SAO.
* The backgrounds lack any detail whatsoever. We are in a character's room but their room doesn't have any personal mementos or knickknacks. In fact, the only room that has detail is Sagiri's, but she's a NEET with the cleanest room I've ever seen.
* To piggy-back off that. She's a NEET hikikomori, stating she hasn't left her room in years. Yet her room is perfectly clean. There is also no bathroom in her room. How does this even work? Does she shit out of the window? This entire show plays this seriously negative affliction as totally okay.
* Uninspired character designs. The parents of our two protagonists are virtually just the same characters but aged up. It is lazy as all hell.
* This show lacks any timing whatsoever. Not only for it's comedic punchlines, but for its fanservice as well. Fanservice can strike at any time and it is distracting and undercuts any potential catharsis this show is trying to establish.
* Episode eleven changes the entire story of the series and renders the past ten episodes totally irrelevant to where the conclusion is heading.
* The finale was completely and utterly pointless, playing more like an OVA than a finale. It was nothing. Much like the rest of this series.
* Girls get embarrassed for virtually no reason. As in, in one scene our protagonist is getting hit on by Elf on the beach as she asks him to spread some sunscreen on her back. Then once he repeats her orders she gets embarrassed about it. Why? Why is girls being embarrassed about inane shit such a cliche in anime?
* In one episode of the series Sagiri makes Elf and Muramasa her models so she can draw them in revealing positions. Yet, to describe the positions, she draws them. So they are models she already had drawn... so why did she even need them to model in the first place? It made no fucking sense.
* Muramasa was often played as the really "cute" one, as in, the characters acknowledged how pretty she was. However, since she has the same kind of body-type as any other girl, apart from bigger tits, it wasn't convincing at all. The usual anime presentation of "same-body, different standards" that makes no sense.
* If you've noticed I haven't actually said what our protagonist's name is, and that's because it doesn't matter.
* Every girl is a fucking slut.
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[The state of anime]
My biggest gripe with this show isn't that it is bad. Well, it is, it's abhorrent in every way. But the biggest problem, and perhaps the most upsetting issue, is that it is so incredibly popular. It is, undoubtedly, in the mainstream. A show like Eromanga is the mainstream in anime. That is so fucking confusing to me. I tried to explain this earlier but the people who genuinely love this show seem incredibly insecure about their love for it.
They explained to me that I'm simply being bias and that I'm "trying" to hate this show. When that isn't true at all. I actually discovered this show through a meme, which is ironically why it is popular in the first place, because it's made to be a meme, and I thought the meme was kind of hilarious and I decided to watch the series. Sure, once I realized it is awful I went into every episode expecting nothing but terrible nonsense, but that's logical. You shouldn't go into a snake pit, get bitten, and then go into a snake pit again expecting not to get bitten. Maybe i'm just a masochist, but I feel like I needed to finish this series simply to experience the most awful possible thing.
However, to many people from what I've seen, this is far from the most awful possible thing. I was constantly told that this is just a "mediocre" show. That i'm over-exaggerating it's awfulness. To that I say, if this is mediocrity to you, then you might have the most incredibly low standard for television. If this is "mediocre" for anime, then anime fucking sucks. If this is "mediocre" for anything, then that anything is the worst.
It is paramount we criticize it too. Supporting a product like this will help fuel more products like this. In 2014, Miyazaki said something incredibly poignant about anime as an industry, and the fans, instead of taking it seriously, decided to take it as a joke. He made it clear that as an industry, anime is spiraling out into nothingness. There is an endless loop of self-inspiration that will never actually prompt original or groundbreaking content.
As an industry, anime is otaku driven, and as a people, according to Miyazaki, otaku's aren't usually capable of understanding how people work. And if you are writing characters to represent people and don't understand how people work, your characters will take roles that are wholly unrealistic. We already see this in anime constantly. Completely stupid character archetypes that simply don't exist in the real world, from Tsunderes to the concept of a pure, yet sexual girls that seems to inhabit essentially every anime with inherent, childish sexuality in it.
So when these totally unaware shows become popular and are roots for inspiration, they spawn more shows like them. Much like SAO did, much like Re:Zero is doing, much like Eromanga sensei will do, and it is a constant loop of something getting worse and worse. It's not funny. It isn't worth joking about. It genuinely makes this industry look awful. I care because I love animation, and while anime and I have mixed feelings about each other, I can't help but support animation as a medium and I want to see it succeed and be utilized to its full potential. But as it stands, anime is hardly scratching the surface and it will continue to scratch less and less as this loop of uncreativity continues. Which is deeply saddening.
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[Conclusion and Criticism]
Criticizing something is important. Critics help spur movements and change notions and promote something of quality. Look no further than the French New Wave, the most influential movement in film history which was spawned in the palms of upset critics that wanted to change the status quo. This movement permeated throughout the world and ended up inspiring the greatest films and directors in of all time. Without the French New Wave, some of the greatest anime wouldn't even exist. Satoshi Kon wouldn't have edited like he did. Monogatari wouldn't have its signature style. At its base, this starts with a criticism. Bringing attention to something. It is incredibly important to fight for the kind of television you want to see.
I get it, though, not everyone wants this in their television. Some viewers just want to see cute girls prance around on screen saying random shit and yelling "baka!" loudly. I get it. Some people don't care about a narrative, or characters, or even visuals half the time. This show being popular makes that clear. However, on behalf of everyone that does care. That does want television, specifically anime to push itself further away from the stigma regarding the quality of the medium, I ask you to perhaps watch a series with cute girls but in a narrative that actually exists. Characters that are actually there. And there are plenty of shows like that, too. You don't have to settle for something like Eromanga-Sensei.
Kyoto Animation specializes in cute girls but with engaging characters, exceptional directing, and spectacular visuals. If you are looking for porn, look up porn. If you want to watch a series, make the sacrifice of watching something that at least has an element of positivity past sexualizing its objects. This'll promote series that will actually create maybe something a bit more interesting and original.
Eromanga-Sensei is genuinely a saddening experience. It is so incredibly bad in just about every way, yet people really love it. It is so popular that it will spawn plenty of sequels and shows copying its already cliche formula that it truly makes me upset. An industry that is already a mecca for unoriginal concepts that virtually just copy one another will just continue to be an industry of looping inspiration and nothing to break up the tedious formula.
Eromanga-sensei is truly the worst.
