Wicked, bad, naughty, evil Zoot!
June 20, 2007
The word to use when describing shows such as Midori Days or Please Twins! is manipulative. I stand by my earlier comment that Coyote Ragtime Show is the worst anime I've ever seen. You might say that I hate Coyote Ragtime Show, but that's far more emotion than I can muster up for these two "romantic comedies." While Coyote takes a promising premise and tries very hard to ape its style, Midori Days and Please Twins haven't made it to the letter "s" in the dictionary. You could point and laugh, but those two would be too busy mouthing out the definition to hear.
Instead I'll sit and type. First up on the chopping block is Midori Days. What I expected was yet another bland "romance" about some angry punk kid and a sweet girl with green hair. This is indeed the premise of the show, except the girl is six inches tall and replaces the boy's right hand.
Let me give you a minute for that to sink in.
Ah, I see you're back from the therapist. Yes, Midori's incredible infatuation with Seiji ends up with her magically appearing where his right hand should be. We never see the point of attachment, but I'm guessing she doesn't really have legs. She's kind of like a sock puppet, except she can drag Seiji around when he's unconscious. Midori's real body is in a coma and she refuses to tell her mother because (in her opinion) it would make the old lady even sadder. Since Midori stays attached to Seiji throughout the entire series, something tells me that only the truth would set her free.
At least Seiji doesn't immediately delve into the perverted actions I would expect. Midori wears a shirt that says "I [heart] Seiji," confesses her love to him in the first episode, and is jealous of his full-size suitors. This is all well and good, but what really irritates me is Midori's one-note innocence. Maybe the only way to deal with this material is just for the writers to take it in stride instead of, say, killing themselves honorably, but I couldn't suspend disbelief. Hand Maid May posed less character issues than dear little Midori. She's a sweetie (too much of one, really), so if the right hand offendeth thee...
Please Twins! is still worse. It's a sequel to one of my least favorite shows, Please Teacher!. The first show was every high school freshman's dream: you end up marrying your super hot teacher ('cause you're secretly eighteen), and she's a "fully compatible" alien too! The Captain Kirk in me has little problem with this, except that the hero of that story also had a normal human girl fall in love with him (likely because the screenplay required her to, as he has no redeeming characteristics). Like everything else in Japan, this sort of thing had to be kept a secret, so the hero and his teacher/wife get to have late-night discussions about their "relationship" and his homework. Oy veigh.
For the sequel they doubled the "unwanted guest" factor, upped the desirability of the lead male and inserted about as many twisted sexual situations as the running time would allow. Maiku ("Mike") is a high school student living in his own house by a lake. Like all well-to-do Japanese boys with big empty houses, he's an orphan. He affords his place by working part-time as a computer programmer. Plus he's got blue eyes, purple hair and isn't half bad looking. And the cute, tall class vice-president has a thing for him. Okay, I'll bite, total Jordan fantasy right there.
One day the girl Miina arrives claiming to be his long-lost twin sister. They both have the same picture of the two of them in a kiddie pool (or two kids who look like them), so she barges into his house and sort of shyly-forcefully demands to live there. He relents, and then another girl shows up with the same picture and the same demands, except this one (Karen, another natural emerald) is practically anemic. So: two girls, one of them probably a sister, the other definitely a stranger. Thus one you can date and another you can merely hug. What's a boy to do?
Well, for starters you can bemoan the "siblings or strangers" bit until you're blue in the face. Seriously, half of the first disc is taken up by the three of them muttering that line instead of typing "DNA test" into Google and clicking on one of the sponsored links. After an hour of being tortured with that question we finally get an idea of what it would cost: 100,000 yen, or about 800 dollars. Which this punk insists he doesn't have. Apparently orphans in high school can't apply for credit cards even though they can own their own house and work enough hours in their spare time to afford said house. No wonder Japan had that banking crisis in the 90's: a horde of shiftless teenagers were granted mortgages!
But while you're not working the extra hours to bring this mystery to a neat conclusion you can still check out the naked girls. Maiku sees Miina in the buff, Miina (lying on the floor) accidentally gets an up-kilt camera view of Karen stepping out of the shower, and Karen sobs her way onto Maiku's crotch just as Mina opens the door. If I could believe for a second that these could be real people I would be laughing or cringing. As it is I'm lying on my couch bored out of my mind, wondering exactly how this kid gets high speed internet service in the boonies.
On the game front Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition is too hard to control, but happily The Darkness comes out next week. And Rockstar's Manhunt 2 is initially given an Adults Only rating? Thank god. Maybe no one will have to play that thing now. I'm all for violence and horror in video games, but it has to serve a point, fellas.
