OP Sequence

OP: 「S・M・L☆」 by Afilia Saga

「①甘草奏の甘くない日常 ②甘草奏の臭くない納豆」 (① Kanzou Sou no Amakunai Nichijou ② Kanzou Sou no Kusakunai Nattou)
“① The not-so-sweet life of Amakusa Kanade ② The not-so-smelly nattou of Amakusa Kanade”

A philosophical conundrum; is it the choices we make that determine our lot in life, or is it the circumstances which we find ourselves i–wait, was that Steve Jobs and Einstein? And did he just ask her to touch his oppai? This show is nuts!

Your Life is Created by the Choices You Make

Please pardon me while I go off on a philosophical bent, but that whole choice montage? This show is right. I don’t know that it meant to say anything profound, but in pointing out the effects of choices it inadvertently pushes forward a point of view that says each and every one of us are in control of our destinies. Most people are passive, reactive, they let themselves be pushed around by the world, but it’s those that are proactive and realize that they control the direction of their lives that make great things happen. And not just in the big decisions, but all the small ones too – a life is made one step at a time, even if it is punctuated by the grand leaps. We’re all in control of the overwhelming majority of our lives, if only we have the wherewithal to make a choice, each and every day.

I bet you didn’t expect a philosophical dissertation in a slap-stick romcom anime, eh? Okay, I’ll stop now. There’s comedy to discuss!

Comedic Sociopathy

This show is the very definition of comedic sociopathy (trope!). From the very first decision I actually found myself feeling bad for protagonist Amakusa Kanade (Toyonaga Toshiyuki), as the options displayed by his Absolute Choice were nothing short of sadistic. Sometimes, the difference between a comedy and a tragedy is whether the tragic event is accompanied by a fart noise, and that’s the line this show walks – when it’s funny, it’s really funny, but when it’s not it can make you feel bad. Whereas I said all of us have choices and can guide the direction of our lives, this is less true for Kanade-kun here, who is being railroaded along his path in life by a malevolent voice in his head. This would be a horrible tragedy if they weren’t playing it for laughs – and more often than not, succeeding.

The Reject Five

In case I haven’t made it clear, I found this show funny. Variously so…it started off funny, started to falter around the two boobie-based questions, but picked up nicely when it came time for Kanade to go shirtless. What was more steadily (if less explosively) funny was the girls. And I’m not just talking about the nameless classmates who kept moving as far away from Kanade as possible, though that was hilarious too! It was the named ones who are totally bonkers.

First is Yukihira Furano (Kondou Yui), who is my favorite of those with a lot of screentime so far. It’s hard to explain why, but her sometimes cool, sometimes crazy, always totally weird personality opened up a lot of opportunities for tsukkomis. Yuuouji Ouka’s (Tsuji Ayumi) genki airhead routine didn’t rock my boat as hard, but at the very least her female viagra gag got a good laugh. Throw them in with Chocolat and Kanade and I think we’ll have a good, hilarious time. And they’re cute too, so if this ever takes the rom more seriously than the com, that will make the rabu-rabu antics even more fun!

The Story Starts as the Episode Ends

One of the odd things about this episode was the pacing. While I genuinely enjoyed the reference montage for my own philosophically nerdy reasons, it dragged on a bit too long, and all the hilarity in the classroom seemed content to stay there rather than get on with whatever was going to happen. The reason for this ultimately became clear – they decided they wanted to introduce beautiful-girl-from-the-sky Chocolat (Sadohara Kaori) at the very end for a nice little cliffhanger, so they stretched things out to get us there. Which in hindsight worked out just fine, but it didn’t feel well paced when I was watching the episode.

Looking Ahead

No idea how Chocolat intends to save Kanade, or even if she’s really talking about his Absolute Choice problem. What I do know is that, though I won’t be blogging this, I’ll definitely be watching it. Hit me up on twitter if you want to chat about the show. Enjoy!

tl;dr: @StiltsOutLoud – References, sadistic choices, & totally crazy girls make this first episode of #noucome a wild ride!

Random thoughts:

  • No one reads porn mags anymore, Japan. Get with the century.
  • Can’t wait to learn who the other two members of the Reject Five are…and to see whether it’ll grow to the Reject Six when Chocolat gets to school, nyahaha!
  • Loli teacher Douraku Utage (Yajima Akiko) knows his secret, which is nice. Also, she’s a loli. Because why wouldn’t an adult educator look like a grade schooler? Not sure whether I’m complaining or not, I’m just pointing it out.
  • Poor guy. Don’t die.
  • I’m going to be out of town for a few days, but Zanibas has promised to give a big hug, kiss, and/or “special reward” to whoever can name the most references from this episode. Don’t worry! He’s a trap, remember? Total Saika material, trust me. Good luck!
  • Speaking of, I have a flight in a few hours, and yet here I am, still awake writing this post. I just want you all to know how much I love you guys. And how much of a masochist I am. Fuck me!

Check out my blog about storytelling and the fantasy novel I’m writing at stiltsoutloud.com. The last three posts: Convenient, The four levels of consuming art, Realism in fiction is overrated, and A change of focus.

Full-length images: 18, 33.

 

ED Sequence

ED: 「太陽と月のCROSS」 (Taiyou to Tsuki no Cross) by TWO-FORMULA (Sadohara Kaori & Zougou Saeko)

Preview

Omake

52 Comments

  1. Well that was something else it combines the mc with his problem and about every anime trope out there, a silver-haired split-personality tsundere, a wild random girl (why would she do that to her mom >.>), a loli teacher, and a well endowed pretty girl falling out the sky. Not only that we still have 2 more rejects 😉 I’m going with answer 1 to continue watching 😀

    agr0n
  2. Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Columbus, Julius Caesar’s Civil War, Evolution, Prince Shitoku authoring the Seventeen-Article Constitution, the Isshi Incident, The Little Mermaid (the original story), Zhuge Liang, the Wright Brothers, Naomi Uemura climbing solo, Yoshida Shouin training Ishin-shishi, the song Hotaru Koi, Matsuo Bashou, Oda Nobunaga and the Matchlock Ashigaru, the Honnou-ji Incident, the Shinsengumi, the famous quote from Hamlet, the Mass–energy equivalence equation, Einstein’s famous tongue picture, Florence Nightingale, Pablo Picasso, the Satsuma-Chosu Alliance, and Walpurgis Night from Madoka.

    Bitch please, I got this. I’m a very capable trap.

    Zanibas
    1. Hey, this one wasn’t that ecchi! There were only a few pantsu shots. We got more manservice than anything…is what I would have said if he didn’t have a flabby torso. Learn from the Free guys, yooou! Hit the gym!

      Stilts
  3. It’s been ages since I laugh the whole episode. This is truly funny and crazy show. Once the male lead do his strip show, I just lost it. Man that totally reminds me of Hosaka from Minami-ke. Imagine if the male lead is swap Hosaka with the Absolute Choice syndrome, now that would be something! Hopefully this show will keep up the pace and not end up with disappointment.

    Yuunn
  4. I personally really hate this trend of heaps of mediocre galge influenced gutter trash collections of paper with hackered sentences straight out of 2chan posts as titles, which offend us by calling itself “novels”.

    “I Can’t Possibly Believe My Osananajimi And Iincho Want To Bang A Bland, Characterless, Audience Surrogate Loser Like Me For No Apparent Reason And Now My Little Sister Is Jealous Oh Look I Just Made A Light Novel Title wwww”

    I’m about to resort to some hearty medieval style tradition of good ol’ book burnin’.

    Before all this nonsense got called “light novels”, at the dawn of the genre’s birth, were some good sci-fi and fantasy novels written for young adults and teens, which I have fond memories of reading in my youth back in the 80s. They were basically the Japanese equivallent of Dragonlance and Xanth. Now that industry has turned into nothing but breeding ground for failed eroge writers.

    More substance, less cliche
    1. “I Can’t Possibly Believe My Osananajimi And Iincho Want To Bang A Bland, Characterless, Audience Surrogate Loser Like Me For No Apparent Reason And Now My Little Sister Is Jealous Oh Look I Just Made A Light Novel Title ”

      I think this would make for an awesome parody of the genre.

      Andmeuths
    2. You can probably trace a line through the years as subservience has grown more common and more intense. “Girl falling out of the sky and falling in love with loser” has been a trope in anime for thirty years and it’s more tired than offensive.

      Even in those early ones there are a lot of unsettling elements. When I went back and rewatched the mid-2000 remake of Oh! My Goddess! I was completely taken out of the fantasy by Belldandy’s reaction to the initial wish. She is terrified at the prospect of being forced to stay on earth with Keiichi. Then, after calming down, returns to her sweet self.

      That type of show is simply adolescent wish fulfillment and really shouldn’t be taken seriously past the age of sixteen or so. After running for over twenty years Belldandy and Keiichi still haven’t had sex. That alone is enough proof that the set up is a girlfriend simulator, the idea that a beautiful girl will fall from the sky and pretend to be your girlfriend but without a real relationship. To someone afraid of intimacy, sex, or rejection that is a perfect fantasy.

      And i think the main problem you’re having here is that this type show tend to be so blatantly, intentionally cliche and often so completely inane that they end up being really off-putting to people who aren’t into them. I mean, these are shows that literally have a formal list of character archetypes, fetishes and other otaku tropes and the goal is to present all of them so the viewers can sit back and check them off on their mental lists, hence it’s very difficult to expect something more than what they are

      Amiluhur
    3. Oh look, some hipster decided to post here.

      It’s called youth entertainment. Don’t expect it to be high art. If you want something that caters to your refined tastes, then perhaps you should stop consuming J-media for a while and move on to other kinds of media. Like, you know, those fuddy-duddy things called literature. Which I did(aside from a healthy dose of Western media), and when I came back to anime, what I found was stuff that caters exactly to my tastes. Maybe you should try it too.

      lalunafelis
  5. I can’t be the only one who was really careful about what I thought about Furano when I first saw her, am I? lol

    I mean, after ones like Gasper, Saika, Hideyoshi, and a bunch of others, these days…if it looks like a girl, acts like a girl, sounds like a girl, and even named like a girl (often times anyway)…it’s probably a boy, lol.

    HalfDemonInuyasha
  6. This comedy gem completely defies my initially low expectations. Noucome is hilarious! I was laughing throughout the whole episode. It’s the raunchy, ridiculous, roasting type of humor at the expense of a person (schadenfreude) that really suits me. The story will probably be a generic harem romance but who cares if the comedy is great. I choose option 1!

    Sylpher
  7. “This show is nuts!”

    Yep, that about sums it up. I hesitate to call this an actual good show, but the utter insanity of it all (not just the choice thing, but every single freaking character too) made for a rather entertaining watch.

    Now let’s see them ramp up the crazyness even further with the other characters!

    Dvalinn
  8. I enjoyed this. I found it funny but still felt bad for the MC, I even had to pause the video a few times because I was so embarrassed for him. Still, the girls are cute, the comedy is humorous, and I’m wondering if they are going to work to heal the MC of his problem. I choose 1.

    GoukaRyuu
  9. Woah,talk about being random!It was fun though.Not expecting anything great from this one either but it’s funny enough to watch so gonna stick with it(probably,3-ep rule is in demand!).

    I also found it pretty funny how they showed what would’ve happened to Kanade had he picked the other option of asking Furano to let him touch her boobies.Hope they do something like that at the end of each episode.

    MgMaster
  10. meet kanade a high school student with a condition where only he can see & hear from his head that make a choice between 2 options yet per delay his heads hurt.

    so he must a pick a choice & do it anyway give from doing shove your face on perv mags, ask someone to touch my body, & go shirtless being real japan man.

    give part of school reject 5 include white hair bit very bad liar & female who full items with her mom former idol now news reporter.

    yet only person know his side-effect choice option is a small teacher so after day in school being forced get hug by “maid”.

    then made choice for beautiful girl to fall from sky did happen yet this blonde female came to “save” kanade?

    YES_YES_YES
  11. Lucky he didn’t choose the “show me your oppais” option :P.
    That remembered me of Parco Folgore’s hit in Gash bell, “Chichi wo moge” xD

    Absoulte choice with Kotomine Kirei’s voice as narrator. Best choice 😀

    Ebisu

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