So, anime as a whole has the reputation of not only being really, REALLY overblown and stupid but also to not be the greatest example in media when it comes to portraying female characters. Even though the days are long gone when people considered anime nothing but "oversexed teenage girls and tentacle porn", its ugly reputation as being sexist, stupid and overly violent still resonates. Especially whenever something like... well, THIS hits the shelves.
I don't even wanna type in the name of the anime because it's such a disgusting piece of crap. Let'S just call it "Schlocky Ikki Tousen Fanfic", or SITF for short. It's not possible for me to accept the fact that really awesome, thought-provoking and just downright beautifully crafted anime like "Now and Then, Here and There", "Infinite Ryvius" or even just fun, sexy ("sexy" will be a keyword later on, so bear with me on this one) titles like "New Cutie Honey" don't get a proper Bluray-release here in the west, while Funimation - as it seems - has nothing better to do than to license this... this wretched piece of baboon doo-doo!
F*ck!
Anywho, plot: Aya and Natsume (the subtle Tenjou Tenghe-reference here is the only thing in this OVA that can be described as borderline clever) are totally, like, BFFs and stuff. One fine day they stumble across a sexy stewardess fighting a sexy priest-chick. Aya - herself a sexy schoolgirl - helps sexy priest-chick out and by doing that, she "accidentally" joins the Martial Hearts-tournament. In this tournament, only women with sexy trademarks are allowed to participate and THE PRIZE (tm) is that any wish you have will be granted. And from there on out, bitches be fightin'. Bitches be fightin' in a garage. Bitches be fightin' in a maid café. Bitches be fightin' on a busy street. Bitches be fightin' everywhere. And then an awful, awful twist happens and this thing turns from a shitty anime into something way more sinister and vile.
Let's get the obvious thing out of the way first: Titties. SITF has lots of titties. Really poorly animated, poorly drawn titties that are shown off in the most unattractive way possible. It's marketed as "Ikki Tousen without censor bars and with a little more gore", but they (= Funimation) left out the "... with way less budget"-part.
Resident animu-schlockmeisters and occasional porn producers ARMS - who, I might add, once were pretty damn good in the animation department when it came to sleazy-ass schlocky action-series (see: "Kite", "Mezzoforte", "Elfen Lied") - churn out their worst effort to date. The animation and art quality is complete horseshit all around. Everything looks unappealing and artificial, and despite being an OVA (for which, generally speaking, studios have more budget on their hands to do stuff with) this could easily be mistaken as a shitty generic shonen-panty fighter-series from the 90s.
Don't even get me started on the soundtrack that might just feature the most awful opening song I've heard in anything ever. Imagine Avril Lavigne being really frigging high and just babbling words in a foreign language into a headset-microphone, while some crappy garage band shreds "Smoke on the Water - The Punkrock Edition" in the background - there's your opening.
The Japanese cast doesn't even care, everybody just phones their performance in and collects their paycheck - and can you really blame them? The English dub is kinda decent, but the talents of the dub actors are wasted on this dull piece of crap, and you cannot make dialogue like this...
"I WILL CALL THIS DAY 'BEST FRIENDS DAY' FROM NOW ON! YAY!"
... sound appealing even if you tried.
To talk about the characters would mean spoiling SITF. And it's against the guidelines to spoil stuff, so let me put it like this: SITF tries really hard to sell one of the unnecessarily darkest plot twists I've seen in quite some time. Emphasis on "tries", because the anime needs AN ENTIRE FLIPPING EPISODE to explain the twist. The fact this twist exists is not my problem though - I dig the idea, sort of.
But the execution is incredibly baffling to watch. All of a sudden, everything just seems cold and meaningless and doesn't even start to make a lick of sense. Characters who were carbon copies of crappy character archetypes become even worse archetypes, people die, people try to explain what the heck they're doing and then SITF just pulls the plug at the end of episode 5 without even bothering to fill the plotholes it left behind, after (clumsily) deconstructing itself and the entire genre it belongs to. And, by proxy, it kinda accidentally shows us what kind of people work at Studio ARMS. And in the industry in general.
Here's what SITF wants to tell us: Basically, everything is a scam and we're dickheads for buying into said scam. SITF takes burning itself down into account to drill this into our heads: we're bad because we watch boobs. Bad us. Bad viewers. Bad Aya for participating in a tournament that fulfills some vage wish. Everything is shit. You're shit. How dare you?
Too bad it comes from the same goddamn studio responsible - as said above - FOR EXPLOITATION. ARMS animated stuff like...:
- Queen's Blade
- Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai!
- Elfen Lied
- Kite & Mezzo Forte
- Word's Worth
... but now WE, the viewers, are the bad guys because we buy into their crap. Well, congratulations, everyone - we watched crappy fighting anime after crappy fighting anime as kids, just HOPING for that one shot of the female characters' titties - but in the end it doesn't really matter, because we're horrible people and everybody's miserable at the end. Woop-dee-friggin'-doo.
And the fact that this message - this ugly, ugly message that harkens back to the "uberviolent underage- and tentacle-porn"-archetype I mentioned above - is basically carried to the west by one of the biggest anime distributors in North America is nothing short of alarming, cruel and a disgrace to the fanbase.
I love anime. I love exploitation. I love sleazy-ass Ralph Bakshi-cartoons. I love Yasoumi "the dude who made Kite" Umetsu, he's one of my favorite animators and character designers of all time. But I don't like being scammed. I don't like being painted as an idiot because I watch animated girls fight each other and getting a kick out of that. I don't like being painted as such an idiot by the same idiots who churn out "Ikki Tousen"-season after increasingly shitty (but at least fun-shitty) "Ikki Tousen"-season, and seem to judge their viewership OPENLY as such idiots. And I don't like it when something this stupid thinks it's smarter than me or anyone who likes exploitation'esque cartoons, by implementing a plot twist this jarring and nonsensical.
0/10
