Suki na Mono wa Suki Dakara Shou ga Nai!!

Warning: spoilers.

The yaoi fangirls are going to hate me for this. Back when this series came out, it was a runaway smash hit with American fans, especially on the internet. I had never bothered watching the series, but did so on the recommendation of a friend while looking for something to fill my yaoi needs.

I am a pretty dedicated fan of yaoi, but Sukisho is the genre done wrong. Ordinary I am fairly forgiving when it comes to yaoi anime because I understand that the prime focus isn't much different than that of a soft core pornography. The idea behind most shounen ai/yaoi series ... is to give the girls (and boys) something to gush over. I believe my main problem with Sukisho is that it attempted an actual plot line only to fail miserably.

So what make Sukisho's intriguing sounding plot line so horrible? The fact that most of it was so out of the realm of possibility. The two main characters grew up as test subjects. Where exactly was child services? Why are they so ruthlessly testing kids?

While these kids are being tested, one develops an alternate personality after seeing the other one walking into the room after a test. His personality develops instantly, and evidently, he teaches the other boy how to have an alternate personality of his own. So thus, ran and Yoru are born. To be fair, this kind of hollywood psychology is acceptable. What strikes me as odd is that the alternates not only have totally different voices than the characters themselves, but when Yoru (alternate 1) appears, he also comes sporting bandages that fly elegantly through the wind after coming out of nowhere.

This kind of overdramatic device is common through out the entire series and used mindlessly.

The characters are likable enough, but lack substance of any kind. [Characters] got my highest rating of 4. i am mainly talking about the two main characters, as the rest were not much more than empty token side characters used for the purpose of goofy antics and "developing" the plot. Despite my distain for the story, I was at least looking forward to some emotional man X man scenes, only to find that whenever one of these scenes came, they were very stereotypical.


To be blunt, half of the cast is so cliche gay that she should have just changed them into women. Suano (lead) Matsuri (the dorm leader) and Kai(the school nurse) all look unquestionably female. This might be making up for the fact that there are literally no women pictured in the show. Sukisho takes the idea of a seme and an uke to an extreme in which i have never seen before, and the romances between these feminine men and their masculine counterparts more resemble a strange sexual fantasy rather than real homosexual relationships. Adding on to this weirdness...apparently every man in the show is gay. No exceptions.

The positive points to these characters all go to the main character Sora. He doesn't take a stereotypical role in any sense. He is just an average, decent guy who happens to caught up in this strange gay fantasy land. Sunao also has his moments, and I liked that despite him being the clear submissive, he was still cheeky and didn't always act like a delicate lady flower.

The worst aspects of these series were the art and sound. If you are an art junkie, Sukisho will drive you crazy. The main complaint I hear even from Sukisho fans is that all of the characters have absolutely wild hair and are in despite need of a haircut. I can't think of a word to use better than "puffy". Most of these guys looked like they belonged in an 80's rock band rather than an anime. It was bad even by anime standards.

Beyond even that, the art was just amateurish and made far too many attempts to be cute. Topping that off with our "so feminine they are androgynous" cast and you have a recipe for disaster.

The background score reminded me a lot of a American television shows from the 1980's. It wasn't very diverse and sounded like it popped off a midi keyboard. Considering almost all anime these days has at least a decent instrumental/j music soundtrack, I would put Sukisho's background score at the bottom of the barrel.

Overall, I would recommend this series to only the most hardcore of yaoi/boys love fans...especially those who like pretty boys. For those of you looking for a series with a developed and realistic plot line, I would look further than Sukisho.

Story: 1/10 My first grip about this show is the story. Now Sukisho does get a story, but it gets it FIVE hours into the six you will be watching it. The story, and background comes so late into the show that I think it would be better to not have it at all.

Art: 5/10 The art is average nothing amazing, not bad. The only good thing out of the show is the fanservice. Other than that average.

Sound: 3/10 I didn't even notice it in the show at all.

Character: 2/10 Are they're characters? Yes, is there development yes? Yet when a show has ... us wait over 80% to get the story, it might as well be absent.

Enjoyment: 6/10 The art, and cheesy humor, and fanservice is enough to make my yaoi fangirl like the show.

Overall: 4/10 Because the enjoyment is good the show is slightly less than good. If you want something with shonen-ai and story this is not the show for you. If you just want fanservice this show is easily enough to satisfy you. So if you want story and shonen-ai I would go look somewhere else.

Sukisho started out with potential to be deep and emotional... I was expecting some sad medical drama ?? I guess that's the best way to describe my expectations.
It took so long to get to the point; it was overly drawn out. I kept groaning my way through the silly episodes because the plot developed ever so slowly. It was silly forever, and then the plot jumped off the cliff into the darkness.
The characters were a little confusing, but probably the best part of the anime. A part of me loved the strange yaoi dystopia where women don't exist. There wasn't a lot ... of development though, it took too long to even get to know the characters.

The dissociative counterparts were a bit unrealistic, but heaps better than a lot of media about DID. It bothered me how different the voices and looks of the counterparts were though. Ran's voice made me die inside a bit every time he popped out. That alone made my give such an awful rating for sound... I guess this anime is 13 years old now, but the art was pretty bad. Early 2000's weren't exactly good years for anime, but still. Many others released around the 2005 era weren't so bad about art and sound.

Overall a good idea I guess? But poorly executed.

The sad thing about this show... is that I really wanted to like it. I actually rated the story quite highly, because I did find the premise to be absolutely fascinating.

Unfortunately, more than half of this series is taken up by filler. Dumb little side plots that really took away from their story. In fact, I considered dropping it about halfway through.

I am not one of those people who is automatically opposed to filler. I think it can fit into some shows really well and add to the world the writers were trying to create. But seriously? A 13 episode show does not ... have time for 6 or 7 episodes of filler!

Because of this, my enjoyment of this show was severely stunted. This is one of those shows I would love to see redone with a little more focus, because the whole alternate personality, dark past premise here was really interesting. All in all, I was very disappointed.

I was looking up some decent yaoi/BL series to watch when this was suggested to me. The person who recommended this genuinely thought it was good, so I thought, why not watch it ?

The huge probem with BL/Yaoi type series is that it is generally low budget and low quality anime, with close to no plot, often bad art/animation, bad music and mediocre characters. Also, the more it gets close to something that looks like a plot, the worse it tends to become, and that's what happened with Sukisho.

***Contains unimportant spoilers***

THE PLOT

I wasn't expecting much from it to be honest. Also, note that I wanted ... to ease up on the rating because in my experience, games don't really translate well into anime series. (Just look at Togainu no Chi, DRAMAtical Murder...) But in this case, it was a confusing mess, it was trying to be something unique, but it never really came to any conclusion and kept adding elements to it, so that you don't know what it's supposed to be anymore. Oh, and of course, LOTS of plot holes, which I don't really mind too much if they aren't appearing that often. It happened a LOT during Sukisho.

Not even one "arc" had a decent conclusion. I don't know if the authors honestly believed that constantly making open ends made the show deeper or if they just didn't care enough. I didn't know how the hell they've served to advance the plot, what they even were supposed to be about or how they're interacting with each other.

A lot of scenes were very out of place. Also, this anime shows some moments without explaining what just happened. For instance, in one of the last episodes, Sora is holding a knife and is getting brainwashed, but 3 seconds later we see Sora's brother dying. It took one episode to learn that Sora's brother sacrificed himself by walking into Sora's knife, because... Okay, there's no explanation for that.

Also, in the dialogue, art etc., you sense an intend to make it sound/look very cutesy, very feminine... and it's very unnatural and cringeworthy.

I do agree however that the main characters have a dynamic that's rather refreshing (the uke doesn't act like the stereotypical uke you'd find in most series for instance), and the fact that the protagonist is for once NOT the uke is also pretty nice.

ART

I personally didn't enjoy it that much. Those who like older manga styles of art might like it, so that just comes down to personal preferences. But what really bothered me was was what it trying to be and how it tried to make some characters look "handsome" or uber-femininely "kawaii", and I cringed so hard at that. The hair of the characters threw me off, besides for a minority of characters who looked ok. The backgrounds weren't special either, just normal.

SOUND

I just finished the anime yet can't remember any soundtrack, let alone one that stood out. It was just as bland as the rest, but I didn't perceive it as being that bad either.

CHARACTERS

To be honest, even after watching the series in one go, I still couldn't remember most of the characters' names.

Now, Sora and Sunao were the least bland characters in the whole story, and even then, they were too uninteresting to care about. Yoru however, looks and acts like a 10 year-old weeaboo's OC. Ran's personnality also enters that territory at times. Most other characters were very forgettable and average as hell.

ENJOYMENT

I gave it a 2 because it's just so... boring. It was definitely a bad anime, but not the kind of bad as in "so bad it becomes funny". It was just very bland. Hell, even the rare kissing/sex/fanservice scenes weren't that entertaining. If they weren't heavily censored, they didn't spark any fujoshi desire in me (except for one scene, but even that was short-lived), and to me, that's a pretty bad sign if an anime who caters to the fujoshi demography allows itself to be half-a**ed while minimizing everything BL related, because apparently, yaoi fangirls like bad anime so it's okay. (It doesn't make it better that most Otome/Fujoshi catered animes are pretty bad as well.



TL;DR

Do not watch this if you mind the quality of your anime.
Do watch if you really like yaoi and are able to overlook bad anime.

If you want to watch a boring, very bad anime to make fun of, I'm not sure you can enjoy it that way either.

Entirely too cutesy wutesy woo. Entirely too predictable. Entirely too annoying. Just what age-group had that been directed to?

When I started watching, I immediately thought that the overly cute and constant chibi-scenes were more awkward than funny. It was like the story was grabbing me from the neck and yelling "it's chibis and they are being cute and funny. NOW LAUGH!". Honestly,

In 12 episodes, there were entirely too many characters and trying to deal with them all just made the anime confusing. Specially when the story-telling jumped back and forth from cutesy wutesy woo chibis to seriousness like... every few minutes. Like the ... review I read about the series before watching it "once you think the chibis are just a bit too much, it changes into more serious story-telling, and when the angst is starting to become overwhelming, it goes back into the humour-mode" ( or so ). That is really hard to pull off without being annoying. Fruits Basket managed this marvelously, Sukisyo didn't. It was just restless and hard to follow. Not to mention that more than once I was stunned by the sheer stupidity of the characters ( someone might call them plotholes... ). In the end, I felt like whole of that second personality stuff was pretty pointless, among many other things. They hardly supported or had anything to with the main plot.

It did jerk some laughter out of me ( but sometimes it wasn't because of the humor ) but most of the time I felt like banging my head to desk.

The style of the animation... ugh... not only was it overly cute, it was pretty generic, anime gone overly-cute. Almost all the most important characters had weird colored hair and eyes while the background characters were almost always that basic brown-haired and brown-eyed types. I really hate it when for no apparent reason characters have cute blue or pink or what not eyes or hair, specially if they totally stand out from the rest of the group yet no one minds.
Animation itself was basic good. Nothing too incredible but not bad either. At least all the eps looked pretty much the same ( at least I didn't notice any big difference anywhere ).

Sora was fun, but his constant chibi-transformations made him a bit annoying. Also, his stupidity from time to time was nothing out of annoying, rather than cute ( and make no mistake, I often like dumb characters ). His alter-ego Yoru, seemed much more interesting.

Sunao was cute. If you like that kind of cute. I don't. His light-red hair accompanied with such basic "difficult uke" behavior was irritating, and his reasons of angsting and eventually putting up most of the story was ridiculous. I can't find such childishness believable, let alone likable.

I was mostly interested in Nanami's and Shinichirou's relationship in the end. Mostly because I like their voice actors alot, which is probaply pretty shallow but that's really all there was to it.

I liked Matsuri a lot, because... can anyone say Ayame ( Fruits Basket )? Sure you can. He was totally, absolutely like Ayame. Then again, that's also why I didn't like him as much as I could have - originality is nice.

While I'm a complete shounen-ai/yaoi fan, I did find the lack of girls a bit silly. I don't think in whole 12 eps there was a single female character around, not even in the background. It was a total Homotopia and while I sometimes amuse myself with such thoughts, it's really kinda unrealistic. That Valentine's Day ep was a sad... sad thing to see.

Anyway, this was definitely a very disappointing anime and I really can't recommend it for anyone.