Minami-ke Okawari – Simply horrible

There are some anime out there, which are simply amazing by their own right: Minami-ke is one of these special flares, lighting my cold dead heart on fire, and making me feel young again with my twenty odd years. Granted, the start of the first series was a bit slow, some might go so far as to say boring, but after a short while the pace gets immensely faster, culminating in an epic ending consisting of equating pasta with bad melodrama concerning an expensive, badly designed boat (and of course lesbian antics, and lesbians rule, right?).

Seeing how the team of Minami-Ke Okawari managed to turn Minami-ke into a story only 12 year old emos could enjoy, really pisses me off to no end. They have nothing new to show, except fanservice all across the board, bad fanservice too. Instead of making this an age 18 and up exclusive and jumping right to the pulse pounding action, noooo, they pinch out an anime for young boys trying to get off to a painting of the french revolution. Oh look! One of the Minami-ke sisters unwillingly exposed her body to a boy, *roaring laughter of the 12-year-olds*. The staff even used the bible black style – the whole time I was expecting tentacles sprouting from somewhere and the anime finally growing some balls, but alas I was rendered impotent by steam clouds and badly designed objects. No, just no, it didn’t work in Love Hina Again*, and it sure as hell isn’t going to work here.

And the staff knew about their lack early on, else they wouldn’t have felt the need of introducing some emo-kid-character all these kiddies can relate to, only for the purpose of justifying all the fan-service; They did this in Love Hina Again too, only that time it was a slut instead of a dork.

The people defending this poor excuse for an anime remind me of particular friends forcing me to watch crappy reality shows on MTV, on which badly dressed strangers find something objectionable in some or the other drawer, and then expect me to laugh, like there’s a state of the art “revelation” going on, and finally accusing me of having no humor, because of me not laughing at this boring, trite shit.

Yes, I know it was done by a different studio intended to be released right after the first season, but does that change anything? Not a goddamn thing as far as I can see.

*And guess where they go in the first episode: That’s right, to a hot spring. Is this supposed to be some cruel perverted inside joke or something?

Bad Anime Endings 101

As every good comedian knows, one must “finish strong” to leave the best impression on the audience, even if the part before was at best mediocre. But what happens when you put on a great performance, dazzling the audience with wit and originality, but put a huge chunk of bad melodrama, about how you lost a dime needed to buy some plastic transformer and that’s the reason you didn’t get invited to the party of the fat kid next door and this somehow skewed your sexuality or something, at the end? Well, first you will be egged and whipped by your listeners, secondly you get endings like those of “Potemayo” and “Beating Angel Dokuro-Chan”.

I don’t know when studios started their abuse of forcing people to watch badly acted, trivial drivel at the end, but it has to stop.

Why do studios do this? Is it because the authors feel the need to somehow justify their comedy series, as if bad melodrama is somehow of a higher level? Why should it be? Good comedy is essential and great satire can form the human mind just as much as monologues about love, hate, the bigger jugs of the guy standing next to you, and so on and so forth. But instead of giving the people what they want, the authors insist on talking about trivial crap, put in orchestral music (because music with a lot of instruments automatically sounds better) and decide to have some sort of weird melodramatic circle-jerk. But most people watching comedy/satire series first of all don’t really care, and secondly, if they haven’t been just watching the show because of the pretty pictures, will see right through the bad efforts of tugging at their heartstrings.

Or is it because they feel they have to “wrap it up” somehow? I don’t know about you, but I prefer open ended scenarios generally more than these “Ok – We’re done now, go on, nothing more to see here, everyone is either dead or happily married”-endings. This wrapping-up reminds me of these “feel-good” movies, whose only objective is to make the viewers feel that they’ve successfully wasted 6 hours of their lives.

In any case, two great anime weren’t completely ruined, but definitely weren’t as orgasm-inducing as they could have been. And one thing is for sure: If I ever want to watch bad drama, I won’t watch anime, but tune in on a shopping channel to buy an axe to kill myself.