First Impressions / Series Introduction / Snapshots

OP Sequence

OP: 「マジヤバもーそうLOVE♥」 (Maji Yaba Mousou LOVE ♥) by R-15 (合田彩, 福原由莉奈, 柏山奈々美, 小松真奈, 積田かよ子, 村上まどか, 村井理沙子, 月宮みどり) (Gouda Aya, Fukuhara Yurina, Kashiyama Nanami, Komatsu Mana, Tsumita Kayako, Murakami Madoka, Murai Risako, Tsukimiya Midori)
Watch the OP!: Streaming ▼

「ようこそ閃学園へ！」 (Youkoso Hirameki Gakuen he!)
“Welcome to Hirameki Academy!”

Going in, I would say my highest expectation for R-15 was that it would be a guilty pleasure. And after one episode, I can safely say that expectation was met, and possibly exceeded.

Make no mistake, I do feel guilty. Very guilty. But dammit, I liked it – maybe even really liked it. AIC is not a crap studio, so you knew it wasn’t going to look half-bad. But what surprised me given the premise and the fact that director Nawa Munenori has been a paragon of the mediocre (and worse) was that I thought it was quite funny. The dialogue was snappy and the episode was sharp overall.

I’ll assume that much of the credit goes to Fushimi Hiroyuki’s light novels for that. It’s a premise that was so offensively stupid and preposterous that I thought it might just be interesting if the anime fully bought into it – a first-year high school boy is a superstar porn writer and enters an academy full of geniuses from all walks of life. And fortunately it appears AIC is pot-committed here, fully embracing everything that’s bizarre and juvenile in that conceit.

Inspiration Academy is graced by a cast of characters that look like anime cliches in a funhouse mirror. Besides our hero/porn writer Akutagawa Taketo (Gouda Aya) we have his best friend Ritsu, a math genius who might be warm for Taketo’s form. We have a cheerleading genius, an inventing genius (whose talent seems to run towards blowing Taketo up with missiles). An ojou-sama and yuri freak with her own followers and servants. Even an announcing genius doing the narration. And then there’s Fukune Narukara (Fukuhara Yurina) the clarinet prodigy and the object of Taketo’s romantic (not sexual) fantasies. All of these characters are designed in a perversely cute manner, the girls all lolis and the boys shotas, as if to further play up just how wrong the very idea of the series is.

A lot of the humor in the premiere comes from Taketo’s ability to lapse into a kind of erotic trance, composing preposterous strands of pornographic prose on whatever surface happens to be handy as drool dribbles from the corner of his mouth. It’s a dumb gag and repeated numerous times, but it actually had me laughing, not least because the stuff he composes is so theatrically florid. It also amused me that when he goes into his creative state where Fukune is concerned, it’s not porn that he composes but sonnets of juvenile romantic adoration. This pisses off the photographer from the newspaper circle Raika (Komatsu Mana) who takes great joy in goading Taketo into his erotic coma.

To be blunt, this is not something you’ll watch and ask “Why isn’t this on NoitaminA?” There are no Peabody Awards or Nobel Prizes on the way. It’s gloriously dumb, highly sexualized and not all worth the time of anyone with a sense of decency. But sometimes dumb entertainment can be kind of smart, too, and I think R-15 achieves that. Taketo is surrounded by sadistic girls and loathed as a pervert by the one he likes, so if this degenerates into a load of abusive humor at his expense that could get old quickly. But there’s some room for clever and even genuinely involving development as he tries to overcome his dark side and prove himself to Fukune. And based on what I’ve seen so far, the humor mostly works, occasionally in spectacular fashion. “Why am I writing a light novel?!” is a line that, in context, struck me as hilarious. And the insane wrongness of the preview voice-over just as much.

So there it is – I liked R-15. Please don’t judge me too harshly for it. I can’t say for sure I won’t get tired of it quickly, but all in all the first ep brought me a good deal more amusement that I’d dared to hope.

 

ED Sequence

ED: 「HIRAMEKI!ピース(≧▽≦)v」 (HIRAMEKI! Peace! (≧▽≦)v) by R-15 (合田彩, 福原由莉奈, 柏山奈々美, 小松真奈, 積田かよ子, 村上まどか, 村井理沙子, 月宮みどり) (Gouda Aya, Fukuhara Yurina, Kashiyama Nanami, Komatsu Mana, Tsumita Kayako, Murakami Madoka, Murai Risako, Tsukimiya Midori)
Watch the ED!: Streaming ▼

Preview

25 Comments

  3. Have to say, at least this main protagonist has his priorities straight. Live like a king off your book sale royalties and build your own pron-palace? Now those are some real goals.

    Will
    Reply

  5. This would’ve been 100% better if not for the Taketo’s fantasies every five minutes. And if every female character didn’t already hate him. I love slapstick, but this is outright hatred! At least the sadistic photographer and even more sadistic chief editor were both amusing. The rest, not so much.

    Aex
    Reply

  8. Hmm…I’ll stick with it a couple more episodes since it brings MM! to mind. I went into that similarly turned off by the first episode, then it had the surprisingly good Yuuno arc, then kinda degenerated back into what I feared it would be. By that time though the characters were established enough to often give me a chuckle even with the repeatative antics, and in the end it wasn’t a bad watch.

    I’ll give this a small window of a chance to see what it’ll do with itself.

    Xin
    Reply

  9. If this is faithful to the manga then I probably gonna hate it,cause the main is the same ballless wussy like most male lead nowadays, let just say if someone frame me for a crime I did not commit and put my life into a living hell, I want revenge once I know who it is, slap, punch, beat up just to get even, but he just act like nothing happen. wussy

    mike
    Reply

  10. Usually whenever this sort of anime come out, i will only watch the uncensored version. Because there no point in watching censored version of it (e.x ochinko). This however actually exceeded my expectation and for the first time i actually consider of watching this without waiting for the uncensored version. This could be a hidden gem.

    lkaze
    Reply

    1. I would say Mitsudomoe is definitely the most optimistic upside possibility here. I remember the bunker mentality I felt saying I liked it at first, with so many others ripping the show and anyone who liked it, and I did think of it when watching the premiere and the way it embraced all that was wrong and ridiculous.

      I don’t expect this show to be that good – the director is nowhere near as accomplished if nothing else. But I’m hopeful that it will have some of the same perverse cleverness.

      Guardian Enzo
      Reply

  14. And fortunately it appears AIC is pot-committed here, fully embracing everything that’s bizarre and juvenile in that conceit.

    Pot will do that to ya.

    Freedom of speech man. Nothing wrong with lovin’ some loli. Haven’t gotten down to watching it yet but if you enjoyed it, knowing some of the other shows you like, I think it’s a safe bet that I’ll be watching this all season.

    Shirt
    Reply

  15. With all the crazy, crappy anime this season, this one fits in quite nicely. It doesn’t really stick out in any way except for the crazy perverted fantasies. Given that, I’ve long gave up trying to watch these last few junky seasons for any kind of plot. Hijinks are fine but this is non-stop & if they can keep up this sort of pace then more power to them, but that bomb-bs is just done to death – it felt like I was watching loony toons.

    Megas
    Reply

  16. Let me take a moment to further defend my defense of this show (LOL):

    Comedy is definitely a personal beast, maybe more so than any other genre. It’s just hard to predict what will strike any one person as funny and another as offensive or stupid. Early reactions to Mitsudomoe (I checked) were very similar, though a little more positive on the whole.

    For me, if this show is going to work it’s going to be as a comedy, not for the fanservice. In the first place I don’t generally watch anime for fanservice anyway (with exceptions for Fairy Tail’s Lucy and a few others). In the second, I think the fanservice not being the point sort of is the point. Maybe I’m giving the LNs too much credit but I think the sheer absurdity of a kid like Taketo writing porn – and the sheer absurdity of the stuff he comes up with – is actually the joke. It’s making fun of a 15 year-old’s idea of what “sexy” is – and of the people who buy up the crap he writes.

    I’ve already said that the bit with the missiles and the general tone of all the girls beating up Taketo is going to get old very quickly if it becomes a centerpiece of the series. And if I’m dead wrong and this really is just an excuse for fanservice (which actually seemed more gratuitous and pointless in ItsuTen to me than it did here) this will become tiresome in nanoseconds flat. But I definitely had a different take on the premiere than most, and I want to give this some time to prove who’s right.

    Guardian Enzo
    Reply

  20. Ah, this is an anime where I have to nag about a lot although I admit that at least humour wise it’s a nice series.

    First of all it’s superfluous use of the word genius. Why do the have to be genius inventor, genius mathematician and genius cheerleader when just calling them inventor, mathematician and cheerleader would do the same. Not to mention they haven’t done anything that shows them being geniuses (and don’t say anything about the mathematician reciting pi since I can do that too and almost failed math, so yeah).

    Now that I have taken away the genius title, I get to the characters themselves, which are… basically characters I have already seen in a lot of other ecchi comedy series. We have the wimpy lead who’s always being pushed around by girls, the lead’s best male friend who always complains how stressful it is to put up with the lead’s behaviour (which makes him look like a tsundere), the shy girl who always runs away because of a misunderstanding, the arrogant and sadistic ojou-sama, etc…
    I’m tired of always seeing the same kinds of characters in these anime. At least make the lead a badass pervert like Rance (this would also solve my next point), or a Goudere (a girl who does everything she wants for the boy she wants, out of her love for the boy, whether he wants too or not [only examples I can think of a Nagihara Sora from Gou-dere Bishoujo Nagihara Sora and Momo in To Love-Ru Darkness])

    The next point is the ecchi scenes. This is a point where the reason I have to nag about it is again the genius setting. Honestly speaking, all of Taketo’s fantasies ended up as narm for me. If this guy is supposed to be a genious with this, why is that while thinking whether I should be aroused or laughing, I always decide on neither of them (This is where I would prefer Rance. His perverted thoughts would be more obviously played for the laughs). Also there’s the thing with pantyshots for no reason (I won’t complain about the censoring), which somehow are kind of boring, compared to for example a panty shot due to the camera changing to the point of view of a guy who’s standing on the bottom of a stairway and looks up the skirts of girls going up. The rest of the ecchi scenes is okay, but also kind of average if compared to the cute and innocent type of Ro-Kyu-Bu and Yuruyuri or the all out pervertness of Manyuu Hikenchou.

    The only part where I have close to nothing to complain about is the comedy part. Most of the jokes are delivired in a straight way and there’s also enough of them to oversee the few less good ones. Of course there is also the usual set of overused jokes (why do dangerous invention always go after the male lead?), but there are also some that are funny exactly because they remind you of something (Like the scene when his habits force him too write on the stone. It reminded me of that one scene in the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar, when he wants to write that the blue pen is red and his hand goes out of control.)

    Well, I guess that’s all I wanted to say^^

    Zannafar
    Reply

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