There's a certain subset of anime fans who savor bad experiences. Those who pick up what sensible watchers drop just to see how bad things can get. Those who seek out “classics” like Skelter Heaven and M.D. Geist to deepen their knowledge of bad shows. Those who came back to Galilei Donna week after week to see if it could sink any lower. For these people, Samurai Flamenco is a godsend. Samumenco isn't just bad, it's transcendentally bad. It's beyond mere words like “horrible” and “awful.” It's a special, painful kind of bad, like if someone kidnapped your family and sent you pictures of their torture every week.
Samumenco's badness comes as a result of intensive study into why shows fail. Thousands of man hours were spent dissecting specimens like Mars of Destruction to find out why they are so bad, to extract their badness essence. Along the way, Manglobe's mad scientists discovered that there was a key element missing in even the worst of the worst, something that could propel mankind into new depths of disappointment. See, there have been shows that started off good before betraying the audience. Guilty Crown disguised itself as a shounen action series before melting into a boring mess. Valvrave seemed like a classic mecha before dropping every single cliché known to man. Shows like these all have an interesting premise as the bait, and once you're hooked, they drag you lower and lower until the final episode sets you free. They leave you bitter and jaded, thinking that you'll never fall for that trick again. Then you fire up Blazblue, and the cycle starts again. Samumenco's greatest accomplishment is that they manage to compress this cycle of excitement and despair into one show, filling you with years of disappointment in only a few months. The key ingredient that made this advancement possible? Hope.
With the average bad show, once it starts going downhill, that's it. It's jumped the shark, passed the point of no return, all you can do is hang on and watch things burn. But Samumenco is not the average bad show. Samumenco offers you a tiny sliver of hope, it promises that things can get better, things can be good again, you just have to believe that the bad times will pass. Then it smashes those hopes into dust and snorts them right in front of you, laughing maniacally the whole time, before giving you another grain of hope, seriously for real this time guys cross-my-heart-hope-to-die. And like a whipped dog you come crawling back time after time, praying that the pain will end, praying that you can have fun again. But you can't. You can never go back. The Kick-Ass style anime you fell in love with is dead, and you're being pummeled with its corpse. Things have gone far beyond what anyone ever thought possible, far beyond anyone's ability to control it. Samumenco deconstructs ideas, then parodies them, then becomes them, then parodies itself. Is it a realistic view of superheroes? Or a critical stab at the superhero genre? Or an homage to a simpler time? Or even a political parody? Is it all just one big joke? The answer is no, to all of those. It doesn't just jump the shark, it turns around to jump the whole aquarium.
It's impossible to truly describe the feelings you'll experience from Samumenco. The ending brings no solace, only pain and bitterness, mocking you for being dumb enough to watch all 22 episodes. So heed this warning, bad anime pilgrim. It's all fun and games until you Flamenco.
