The anime I’ve been watching Summer 2018 edition – Really stupid comedies

As you can see, I have only been watching the good stuff, namely Gobdwarf. 

In the past few months I’ve moved countries, changed career, started a new job, unpacked an entire home, and generally had a lot happen. I’m finally able to calm down and relax a bit. In that time I’ve suddenly found myself with the itch to write more again. Turns out when you spend the past two years having to churn out articles for a living, it leaves one with little enthusiasm to come home and continue writing as a hobby. That is basically the reason why I stopped writing on this blog for so long. Now that I no longer write that much for a living anymore, I’ve found I actually want to write for fun again. You’ll probably see a lot more of me from now on, at least as I try get back into the swing of writing about anime again.

This also means I have a lot more time to watch anime again. However given the exhaustion of the moving process, I’ve fallen behind on all the more respectable anime like My Hero Academia, Attack on Titan, Bananafish, Lupin III, Steins;Gate. Meanwhile all I have kept up with have been the incredibly stupid comedies from this season. So yeah, that’s what we will be talking about today!

Asobi Asobase

Early on I was all ready to call this anime of the year. Bizarre, eccentric, madcap, nonsense of quite astonishing proportions. It has the setup of a cute girls in afterschool club do cute things, except none of the girls act cute or indeed do anything cute, not least of all their facial expressions. A lot of the faces come out of horror manga, with the use of lighting to create distorted, evil expressions as they react to the child’s game they have decided to play this week. Either that, or the faces come from expressionist art. Essentially the idea is to make mundane situations requiring the most extreme responses, from hospitalising yourself in a shoe toss by hurling yourself off a hill on a bicycle, or act as though you are being dragged into hell by Jigoku Shoujo in a game where you pretend you are pulling turnips from the ground.

It is very blue humour, which is both part of why it is so amazing while also being its biggest downfall when it fails. Jokes about farts, butt slapping, sex, and shogi and so on all make the show push further with its jokes than most other anime do, with some truly incredible results. In a way the main girl in the show feels like the main character in Watamote if she could actually socialise, with all the horrible thoughts from her head coming out as part of her personality. The main problem with Asobi Asobase is when it misses the mark with a joke, it comes from lazy and often harmful stereotypes. Christmas cake teachers, smelly foreigners, slutty ganguros, transphobia, you name a lazy offensive stereotype and there’s a good chance Asobi Asobase will make a joke about that. You can use blue humour to push boundaries in comedy to make some quite bold statements. Asobi Asobase uses blue humour to make the laziest, harmful stereotype observations. When it’s on form it’s one of the greatest anime comedies ever, but when it goes for this sort of humour it gets it so wrong I almost feel betrayed.

Grand Blue Dreaming

Definitely the stupidest of the three stupid anime comedies, and by quite a distance too. Grand Blue Dreaming is supposedly about diving, but I see more diving in the average Premier League game than in this show. I think in the 6-7 episodes I’ve watched, they’ve actually gone diving in the sea once, and even that they showed very little underwater and seemed more interested in the girls briefly in bikinis. Not that the show is all semi-naked girls. The ratio of naked girls to naked dudes is about 1 to 5 billion. Considering they manage this with very little use of stripping to go diving, that is impressive. The nudity is justified primarily through the consumption of alcohol. Also because idk naked dudes getting blackout drunk and heading to lectures in their underwear is funny and quite relatable as a college life experience.

I hesitate to call this a good show. The animation is truly dreadful, like legitimately the worst I have seen in a television anime in several years. Its closest comparison would be something like Moyashimon in the sense that it’s a slightly raunchy college life comedy, but I felt like I learned something from Moyashimon while it also had characters with more depth and cleverer comedy, while all I’ve learned from Grand Blue is if you sense of smell is gone you can tell something is vodka and not water by setting it on fire. But I keep watching Grand Blue Dreaming because I keep laughing at all these stupid people and their dumb actions. The bisexual sempai trying to be a good wingman because she’s convinced our main character likes the blonde otaku dude. The gradual acceptance that rock paper scissors requires you to strip. Whenever it actually tries to give the character depth it tends to be very dull, so on the whole I would just prefer it continues to be stupid so I can continue laughing.

Chio’s School Road

Not to be confused with Chi’s Sweet Home, which is about a cat named after pissing, Chio’s School Road is about a gamer who gets called cunt in CS:GO by foreigners and decides to practice her methods of owning noobs in next night’s session on her way to school. Its setup is quite similar to Asobi Asobase in the sense that it is about taking the mundane activities of cutesy girl anime and taking them to extremes. However the actual results of the two are quite different. While Asobi goes for the nightmarish extremes of horror and blue comedy, Chio takes a more logical approach where to expand the original premise of the joke. Dramatic framing to escape mild problems of being trapped in a bathroom or facing a tough bike gang member. The internal monologue of Chio is where most of the comedy comes from as she tries to work her way out of her current predicament in her head while plunging herself into further problems.

In a way this is the least stupid of the comedies of this season. The format of the jokes requires imagination and ingenuity to come up with the most logical escape solutions while turning those solutions into results with the most hilarious of consequences. The entire Bloody Butterfly segment is a great example of this, as is the end of the cigarette gag where she tries to convince the teacher she is totally a bad girl. Where Chio’s School Road falls is in a kinda similar fashion to Asobi Asobase, when it falls to more lazy boob type jokes. I know the author used to be a porn mangaka, and to be honest the random upskirt flashes don’t really bother me since they aren’t exactly done with pervy gaze in mind and more come about from the ridiculous situations Chio has forced herself into and add to the ignominy of what she has found herself requiring to do. But please, enough with the anti-grav giant boobs.