This Spring, there’s been some great anime like Skip and Loafer and Mashle and you can read all about it in my May Wrap-Up. But wow, there’s been a lot of misses this season. Here are couple of hopefuls that fell flat.
Dead Mount Death Play
A corpse god necromancer is defeated by a hero but in his last moments, he sends himself to our world.
Yes, it’s an isekai, but also, it’s a seinen so I had hopes that this could be quite interesting―or at the very least would be handled with more care. Alas, the art is bad and there’s way too much exposition. Also, having the first dark-skinned character being way more menacing than anyone else… including serial killers and hired guns???? Nah.
A Galaxy Next Door
Ichiro is a manga-ka who is struggling to make money but needs to support his younger siblings. He gets an assistant who helps turn around his career… almost as though we should just be watching her make art and get big on her own instead of supporting a man.
I don’t understand who thought an audience would sympathize with a landlord who is risking his younger sibling’s future by trying to make it as a manga-ka. Also, this seinen seems to follow the wrong POV. The romantic interest―who also works for the MC―is way more interesting but I guess we can’t have good things.
Insomniacs After School
Ganta and Isaki are insomniac schoolmates. They struggle with their sleeplessness but bond over this and other secrets they share with each other.
I saw the weird pans over teenagers and heard the nonsense ‘woes is me’ and dipped out.
My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv 999
From the anime studio MADHOUSE comes a rom-com anime that fails at both the romance and the comedy. Akane is a college student who just broke up with her boyfriend. In an online game, she pushes her drama onto others until she gets her heart broken.
I’m not watching a romance with a pick-me gamer girl as the MC.
My Home Hero
Tosu is a middle-aged businessman whose daughter is being abused by her boyfriend. The boyfriend and his crew humiliate Tosu as if an abused child is not enough motivation. Tosu goes to confront him but things spiral out of control.
This seinen has the wrong POV; there’s no reason why women need to suffer so men can have the drive to go on a hero’s journey. It would have been more interesting to see the woman being abused have some agency. There are ways to do this story right but this anime is very much giving Taken (2008) vibes.
Too Cute Crisis
Liza Luna is an alien working in the army of the space empire Azatos. She comes down to experience Earth, thinking it was a low-level civilization, but after going to a cat coffee, she is too taken by the cuteness of cats to attack.
I thought that this anime would be like Yoru wa Neko to Issho which is a hilarious slice-of-life cat-centred short anime. But wow this ain’t it. I got real bored real quick. It doesn’t help that it’s a shonen with a girl as an MC―which says a lot. It’s also doing the thing of ‘alien/foreigner goes to Japan and falls in love with things there and so doesn’t destroy the world’… Isn’t there a name for that? Oh, yeah, exceptionalism. Also, the alien’s clothes make no sense.
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