Hiiro no Kakera episode 1

Future Diary is on a break this week, but who cares about Future Diary anymore ? Not me, oh lawdy me. That show is old news and now smells worse than your mother’s cootch. We’ve got new shiny unsullied anime to watch and be thoroughly disappointed by. So grab your nearest dakimakura and get ready to self-insert into the latest bland ineffectual MC-kun gets surrounded by beautiful members of the opposite sex.

Meet Pototo-chan, so named because replacing her character with a potato on a stick would have exactly the same effect on the story. However unfortunately the potato market for insert characters has never been particularly profitable, so the skin drawn over this ball of inneffectual-ness is that of a generic female, making it easier for girls to project themselves into her. She’s moved to Unspecifiediland where she is infused with a ~magical power~ that means scores of beautiful boys start talking to her for no adequately explored reason. Oh, and the power helps her protect the temple from raging CGI monstrosities or something. How she does this is unclear, considering she’s about as useful in a fight as a rubber duck, but I’m sure the exposition granny will explain this to us at some point. You know how anime like Stand Alone Complex or Un-Go taxes your mind by forcing you to think about complex political policies? Hiiro no Kakera taxes your mind by testing to see if you can stay awake through long dull exposition dumps.

The animation is all a bit of a joke. When it’s not just talking heads, it’s cuts like this. The somersault was animated by someone who had never watched someone complete a somersault in real life but understood the general idea. It’s like he took the outline of the character in Flash and then rotated him a bit. But of course nobody watching this particularly cares about good animation (although good presentation would make exposition dumps less tedious to sit through), they care about pretty character designs! I can’t particularly comment on attractiveness, but I can comment on how effeminate they look. On a scale from 1-10 where 1 is a character from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and 10 is they just look like flat-chested girls, the guys here rank around a 7. Not quite Ouran Host Club levels of effeminate, but hardly brimming with masculinity either.

Hiiro ni Kakero is a reverse harem through and through. They even introduced an enthusiastic wing(wo)man character. The selection of bishies could easily be genderswapped and fit perfectly into regular harem stereotypes. The legal shota. The dozy bookworm. The kind glasses-wearing senpai. We men and women aren’t so different in our fetishes after all.