Another day, another ecchi comedy, this one based on the manga by Yumi Nakata (oh?) & directed by Hiroyuki Furukawa (oh...)
It's not uncommon for odd couple romances in anime to employ some contrived means to quickly get our odd couple together before just as quickly forgetting about it. My Wife is the School Council President's (Okusama) devise is handily put in the shows title, just in case you were wondering how Ui & Hayato could possibly find themselves embarking down the road to romance that it's clear from the start they will be taking. As Vice-President of the Student Council, Hayato finds himself reluctantly serving under the leadership of Ui, who won the presidential election on a platform promising to bring love to their school, which bans relationships between boys & girls. As if Hayato's day couldn't get any worse, that evening he finds Ui at his door, her stuff on her back & an email in her hand, announcing that they are to be married. What a setup!
Well no, not really, because that would imply Okusama makes any use of its setup at all. Instead, we're treated to yet another by the numbers ecchi school rom com where the only thing that really distinguishes it from its peers is the one paragraph synopsis you read before watching it. There's nothing about the "marriage" between Hayato & Ui that couldn't just as easily have been explained away by, for instance, an administrative error by the school causing them to share a dorm room. In the end, all it's there for is to establish that Ui is Hayato's "girl" & the story, such as it is, will go through the usual list of love triangles, wife husbandry & "innocent" misunderstandings that every high school romance seems to have to go through, ecchi or not.
It's not often that I find myself thinking "I wish they focused more on the story" when it comes to ecchi comedies like this, but Okusama is an exception because, somewhere in there, there's a decent sounding little story that could be going on. Ui's goal of bringing love back to the school, facing off against the more prudish & busty (because that juxtaposition is funny. I SAID ITS FUNNY!) Rin, head of the disciplinary committee could have led to an amusing clash of personalities as they battle for the morality of their classmates. Even when it's clear the main reason for Ui's enthusiasm is for the "humorous" contrast it creates with her complete cluelessness about what lovers actually do when she's with Hayato, it could have still told a decent, if less original story.
Indeed, the framework for such a comedy is there, but it's so lazily put together that it undermines anything the show might be going for. The usual romance tropes are here: Ui having made a forgotten childhood promise; Rin having a personal reason to oppose Ui with the tenacity she does; a love triangle which serves to create misunderstandings between the three while also ultimately showing Hayato why he's better to stick with Ui; an assortment of other girl characters that get in compromising situations with Hayato to shake things up a bit - It's all there, all thrown in with little care & with little effort to set it up or to show how it impacted on the characters afterwards.
Everything feels like it's just going through the motions, the minimal effort required to get us between contrived ecchi scenes where we're treated to the usual ecchi girl logic like "Oh, my love rival gave you her panties? Well, it seems the logical thing to do would be for me to let you take mine off in this back alley!" Nothing about Okusama has the goofy charm of 'Golden Boy,' nor the shamelessness of 'Haganai' or 'Highschool DxD.' It doesn't really even measure up to Yumi's previous adapted work 'Chu-Bra,' which was nothing special but at least made some effort to distinguish itself & actually run with its premise. & all this is before we get to the matter of how the show approached it's TV censorship.
Now, it is possible to watch the episodes uncensored if you want to (& clearly a lot of people on Crunchyroll did), which renders this a somewhat moot point. None the less, it's worth mentioning because Okusama employed possibly the most obnoxious method I've yet encountered. While one comes to expect light lines & black bars in ecchi shows, at least until the BDs come out, Okusama opted instead to cut the scenes from the show entirely, replacing them with "wife theatre" a stick puppet show that looks like it was originally conceived as the preview skit after the end credits. The jokes aren't funny, aren't clever, go on ridiculously long &, perhaps worst of all, aren't really being used to censor anything particularly lewd or pornographic.
In the final episode, for instance, we're subjected to a two minute skit where the female cast fight JRPG style against footage of a kitten (taming the pussy hahaha!) which gives the impression that it's replacing a full H scene. Yet in the uncensored version it turns out to have simply being replacing a twenty second boob smother that includes, shock horror, a nipple slip. I haven't gone through every omitted scene to check, but I doubt I missed anything to merit it being removed entirely rather than simply blurred or blacked out. The art isn't bad, by any means. But really if that's what you're here for you might as well look for a compilation of the ecchi scenes to avoid an hour of "plot" getting in the way of what you're after. Quite why Furukawa went with this, I have no idea. Maybe it was supposed to give the illusion to the viewers that this show was dirtier than it turned out to be. The result, however, was to make the show even more of a chore to sit through that it already was.
But even without Wife Theatre, there's nothing to recommend about Okusama. It's not as lewd as it tried to imply. It's premise is wasted, it's story pedestrian & it's characters are dull. The only thing to say in its favour is that it's 8 minute episode length means you can watch the whole thing in under two hours, shrug you shoulders & move on.
