Anime-WTF? #1: The Harem Menace

There are so many harem anime out there that most of them are bound to suck.
And they do.
Horribly.

Welcome, Anime-niacs, to Anime-WTF?....

Since I have watched a ton of anime, and therefore a ton of harem anime, I know this to be a fact. I don't necessarily hate the genre itself (as evidenced by the number of Anime-BAW issues I have devoted to it, and that I have found at least three such series to be worthwhile). I just think it's incredibly difficult to do something new (let alone good) with such an oversaturated genre. Today, I've decided to kick off the spin-off by doing a harem dump. Or visiting the Harem Dump. Or taking a harem dump.
You decide.

No ranking system today because they all suck, so let's go!

DearS--The title is stupid. The theme music is annoying. The animation looks like Shin-Chan fucked Slayers and nine months later, a Hills Have Eyes baby popped out. And the characters…mostly unlikable and barely worth calling characters at all. Caricatures is probably a better word for them. The “protagonist” of this “harem anime” is an oblivious, angry, asexual, xenophobic high school porn dealer with dark, spiky hair, a childhood friend whose father is his landlord, a perverted little sister who isn’t his biological sister, a classroom full of perverted cardboard male students and angry, judgemental cardboard female students, an annoyingly oversexed homeroom teacher who is seemingly just there to incite a given episode’s physical gag, and a harem so small (two hot alien slave girls, because Tenchi Muyo, Vandread, Cat Planet Cuties, Date A Live, and Heaven’s Lost Property definitely never did that before, in addition to the step-sister and the childhood friend) that this show barely has a genre. Yes, the basic physical gags were well executed, but they never felt like there was any substance to them because the “characters” just did whatever their assigned trope was to get to the punchline. In many cases, the caricatures will only “trope out” for part of an episode to establish the kind of character they’re supposed to be, and then never display that behavior again. Oddly enough, the only real characters in this show are the DearS (both the singular and plural form of the “word”) themselves, a mostly female, mass-produced race of alien slaves who crashed on Earth one year prior to the start of the series. Not only do they serve as the Sausage Party-ish commentary device of “what if stuff, but with souls,” they are the only things in the series to display genuine personality and visible character development, while the so-called protagonist spends the entire series yelling at the defective DearS he took into his home (who clearly loves him, even though she doesn’t fully understand what the feeling is), pushing her away for the stupidest reasons, and denying every strange but glaringly obviously true thing that stares him in the face, doing so with such frequency as to invite hatred. DearS even attempts to have a “villainous” “organization,” but with the majority of the focus on slice of life and obvious physical comedy, there isn’t enough room in this skeleton of an average show for any kind of organization or any acts that could be categorized as villainous. All they really come off as is a bland fan-service corporation. The final episode hints that if there had been a second season of DearS, something interesting might have finally been attempted with the series, but it took thirteen episodes of nothingness to get there. To put it simply: DearS SuckS AsS.

My First Girlfriend is a Gal--Take a predictable harem setup, add unlikable characters, bland-to-irritating voice work, breasts far larger than those featured in High School DxD, and references to underage fetishism, and you have a series I wouldn’t watch past the first episode without several controlled substances, a restraint chair, and eyelid clamps.

"Take a deep breath and clear your mind. You know what is best.
What is best is that you comply. Your compliance will be rewarded."

Shuffle!--The exclamation point is a clear sign that this harem series is trying too hard to convince its viewership that it’s interesting, exciting, and whimsical. It’s not. Not any of those things is true. The protagonist is soft-spoken, dimensionless, and clueless. The harem girls are gods and demons from alternate realms who are also soft-spoken and all have pointy elf ears for some reason that make one species indistinguishable from the other. The atmosphere is dull, sad, and boring beyond tolerance--even though I tolerated several episodes in the hopes that something interesting would happen. Terrible voice work, terrible animation, and a flat, depressing tone. I think I hate this more than any other bad anime out there because at least their overt awfulness made me feel something, however burning and negative that something might be.

The Testament Of Sister New Devil--The protagonist of this supernatural fan-service festival learns one night that his two new step-sisters are hellspawn; one a succubus, the other a future devil queen. Generic, borderline pornographic hijinks ensue to the hero’s repeated embarrassment. Like many other series of its…class, Testament makes many failed attempts at having a story (like the hero wanting to get stronger so he can protect his devil sister from those who want to take her throne for themselves) or making a character interesting (like the school nurse, who seems to know more about the hero’s life circumstances than she lets on), but these efforts are repeatedly derailed by one soft-core sequence after another, like a train whose progress has been thwarted by an avalanche of porn in the Grand Tetons. Yet another series that could have been so much more than bad if it hadn’t willingly sucked.

Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches--The school bad boy joins a defunct high school supernatural studies club when he realizes that various weird things happen when he kisses people. After a few Freaky Friday/Sister, Sister episodes, my interest waned to passive viewing, and two more after that, I stopped watching it altogether. This might have been an average series, had the atmosphere been just a touch livelier and the plot mechanics not been derived from twenty-five-year-old American movies and TV shows.

Note: There is a second season of Testament of Sister New Devil, subtitled BURST (possible sexual innuendo, anyone?). A second season of Shuffle! (subtitled Memories) was also produced, being mainly a flashback/clip show collection according to what I've read about it. No further seasons have been ordered for DearS, My First Girlfriend Is A Gal, or Yamada-Kun at this point. I wonder why....

More bizarre garbage (bizarbage?) to come in the next issue of Anime-WTF, which will deal with terrible comedy series. Enjoy?