Forgive me God of all Weaboos for I have sinned. I didn't enjoy Kill La Kill. Actually, it's worse than that. I fucking HATED Kill La Kill! It wasn't funny, it wasn't clever, it wasn't a "brilliant satire". The animation was decent as befits a modern series with a huge budget, but nothing else was worthy of praise, let alone the amount of sheer adoration this series gets. Many people may disagree with this assessment, but I will explain.
Firstly, I would like to clear something up that has been bothering me. My fellow Americans frequently use the word "satire" incorrectly, to the point that I am convinced most people don't actually understand what it means anymore. There are several forms of classic satire, but the most common is probably still the Juvenalian satire created by the Roman writer Juvenal. The point of this style of satire is to write in a voice that the author actually opposes and comically highlight everything wrong with the position that the voice is supposedly arguing in favor of. A well known contemporary example would be Stephen Colbert's faux conservative character from the Colbert Report. In the next paragraph, I will show an example of what an actually "brilliant satire" looks like.
If Kill La Kill isn't what I consider a great satire then what the hell is? What does one look like? A good example of a truly brilliant and hilarious satire would be the novel Dead Souls. The novel was written to viciously mock the callous cruelty, uncaring nature, and disgusting greed of the upper class. Our "hero" is an immoral asshole who wishes to get rich using a profoundly ridiculous and darkly hilarious plan. The novel was written when slavery was still legal, and during that time period the law plainly stated that slaves counted only as property and not as people. Our hero figures out that therefore slaves could legally be purchased and sold after death because legally property doesn't suddenly cease being property. The concept of a sales catalog and people buying products without ever seeing them was brand new at the time and gives our hero a wonderful idea. He could legally buy hundreds of dead slaves for pennies and sell them (sight unseen) for about 10 dollars each to wealthy land owners who would jump at the deal of buying lots of slaves at a discount price. Our hero insinuates that his "discount slaves" are women, children, and elderly and that is why they are so cheap. He allows his buyers to fill in the details without ever explicitly saying an untruth and therefore avoiding being sued for false advertisement. His buyers believe that they have ripped off our hero, only to get hundreds of corpses dumped on their lawns. Every character including our "hero" is portrayed in an extremely negative manner and thus readers are encouraged to laugh our asses off at the slavers getting royally ripped off. The fact that the entire plan would have been completely legal at the time the novel was written only made it funnier. The author is pointing out to his readers that they lived in a society where something that ghastly and morally outrageous was legal and encouraging them to fight against slavery without ever having to explicitly say so. A true satire makes a bold stance against a position that is still popular with a large portion of society and highlights everything wrong with that position. Satires address large societal issues and try to use comedy to create real social change. A satire is NOT just a work that revels in its own stupidity in order to vaguely mock other stupid works that are universally considered to be stupid.
Ok, so if Kill la Kill isn't technically satire then what is it? A work that tries to be really stupid and absurd in order to make fun of a genre is typically called a "spoof". Although less intellectually lofty than the satire, spoofs can still be great! Good examples would be the works of Mel Brooks like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, which are quite rightly considered 2 of the greatest movies the United States has ever produced. Sadly, Hollywood never quite understood what made Mel Brook's movies so special and started shitting out truly awful spoofs: Mafia, Ricky 1 (a spoof of rocky), Scary Movie 1-5, Date Movie, Vampires Suck, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, etc. Enter Gainax, everyone's favorite insanely overrated anime studio to copy the Americans and produce their own low quality spoofs to cash in on this trend. We get "great" works like Kill La Kill and Panty and Stocking as a result! Hooray! Where does Kill La Kill rank on the hierarchy of spoofs? Slightly above the movies of Seltzer and Friedberg, but not quite as good as The Lucas Bros Moving Company.
We all know Shonen anime has REALLY stupid cliches, objectifies women, and has head bashingly retarded plot holes. Making a show that takes all that EVERYONE already agrees sucks about anime and reveling in its own shittyness isn't very clever and isn't actually a great goal. Simply being self aware of your own stupidity doesn't make a show or movie good. Was Wild Wild West aware that having a giant spider robot and REALLY silly dialogue and action was stupid? YES! They were very aware that they were making a stupid movie that took all the cliches of summer blockbusters and turned them up to 11. Does that make Wild Wild West a clever cinematic masterpiece? NO! No it doesn't! In the same way, Kill La Kill's self awareness doesn't save it from being a piece of shit anime!
