The Missed Opportunity and Magnificent Disappointment
Let me start by saying that this is a bad series. A bad series that I watched from start to finish. I actually have a tremendous amount of guilt laying over me for doing so, but I just couldn't stop clinging desperately to the hope that it MIGHT have a redeeming quality strong enough to justify its existence.
The best way to describe this show, that I've found, is to label it as a parody of a well-established genre. A spin-off, poking fun at the tropes and cliches of a well-loved and solid-standing category of anime for fans to have a cheap laugh at. The problem? There is no well-established genre. This is it. Monster Musume is the the foremost flagship of the Monster Girl anime genre. A fruit ripe for picking, full of potential for adventure, deep story telling, and compelling characters, reduced to cheap sex jokes and one dimensional personalities. Even after all twelve episodes of this travesty, I'm still unable to remember the protagonist's name, so unmemorable was he.
In short, Monster Musume is a show (for lack of a better word) about a modern day Japan that has seen a supernatural influx of Demi-human "monsters" (the origin of which remains either a complete mystery, or briefly glossed over. I can't remember if it's mentioned even once). After determining that the "monsters" are sentient and not trying to invade the country, the Japanese government implements a program to help these individuals ease into human society and deal with cultural differences. They are paired with human host families to help open relations between human and monster societies. Overall, not a terrible concept for a show. The execution on the other hand... that's a different story.
I wish I could take credit for this summary of the plot, but alas, it was written by a friend on a challenge to summarize an anime while making it sound as awful as possible. It's sadly accurate:
"A straight, Japanese man suddenly finds himself the very unwilling sponsor for a bunch of foreign women who keep sexually harassing him. Several of them are special needs. He would like to wonder how exactly this is even legal but he's too busy trying not to be killed by being slapped around by a bunch of bigger, stronger women. Eventually he's told that he is now not only allowed to marry one of them, he is now legally obligated to do so even though he is blatantly not interested in any of them."
So let's analyze this show a little more closely and see what they did right and wrong. Yes! Not every single line in show is a travesty, believe it or not.
The first monster girl that our "hero" hosts is a lamia, a half-snake half-human. Being a harem anime, she immediately has an attraction to our nondescript protagonist, fawning possessively over him at every turn. Her defining characteristic is being a bad cook and... Well, that's about it, really. She's about as interesting as a wooden block, so I'm going to have to take a point off right there.
Our second monster girl is a harpy, and already we see a problem with this. Traditionally, harpy and lamia mythos is very similar, almost identical even, so the writer has backed himself in to a corner early on. How are we going to differentiate these characters in a way that makes sense? Well, in order to make sure the characters weren't too similar, he makes the harpy a complete moron. Because, you know, a "bird brain!" Yup. We're basing our character's personality on a pun. My biggest problem with this? Birds are actually very smart. One of the smartest species on our planet. So... great call there. I'm just going to tell you flat out that there's a scene in which the main character is feeding ice cream to the harpy in a park, the "joke" of the scene being that it looks like she's performing fellatio on him in front of a group of people. It's made even "funnier" by the fact that our harpy character looks very young. Because, you know... pedophilia is hysterical! HAHAHA! IT'S SO FUNNY, RIGHT?! No... It's an awkward and horrendous scene designed for shock value. Heaven forbid you be watching with another individual. You might not be able to look each other in the eye for the rest of the day.
Harem girl number three is a centaur. She has some genuinely alright moments, and a lot of potential (that, naturally, goes unused) to be an interesting character. She hails from a land of knights and monarchy, but all that gets thrown out the window when you learn, in the first encounter with her, that she came to Japan so she could find her true love via contrived anime plot or some such crap. I don't know... I wasn't paying that much attention. Anyway, our heroic, not-quite-as-interesting-as-a-moldy-piece-of-cheese protagonist and our centaur lady chase a thief in the first scene we see them together. He jumps on her back and chases the thief down on his scooter. We later learn that riding a centaur without her permission is actually the equivalent of rape in their society. When he apologizes for his mistake, she immediately forgives and falls in love with him. That's right kids. I guess the lesson here is if you rape someone and tell them you're sorry, everything will be just peachy keen and they'll swear their undying loyalty to you. Except, guess what? That's NOT how it works, and this scene is implying some pretty horrendously flawed ideals.
Next we have a mermaid and a goo-girl. They're exactly what they sound like. There are some interesting moments regarding the mermaid and how she can get around on land, and how they have to modify the housing for her to live in, but for the most part it's all just a bunch of squandered potential. The mermaid's thing is she wants to be involved in a romantic relationship that ends in tragedy. What that means is pretty ambiguous, however, there is a scene later where she intentionally attempts to drown the protagonist while having sex with him (both of which she fails at. Too bad, as it would have put this god forsaken show out of its misery a little earlier). The goo-girl doesn't have a whole lot going on for her. She barely speaks. I guess she's supposed to have the reading level of a kindergartner or something, but her personality and intelligence is supposed to change based on what nutrients she absorbs or some such. I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think of her as some sort of comic relief character instead of an actual pivotal plot character... It's hard to tell though, because the plot doesn't pivot around a whole lot, and the other characters generally seem about as intelligent as her.
The sixth character finally introduces something interesting. Genuinely. The sixth girl is a drider, half-spider half-human. When she's introduced, she is living illegally in Japan, holed up with a man exploiting her for the silk she's able to weave in exchange for the secretive housing. I was blown away that this far in to the show they would actually choose to explore an interesting subject of social conflict. Not all these monster girls can be happy legal immigrants and what essentially boils down to being foreign exchange students, so how do you deal with the ones that are dangerous, or have run away from their host families, or were abused, or exploited? The drider character actually explores some of the deeper questions of the conflicts societies like this would face if they were ever brought together, and it doesn't do it poorly. Unfortunately, as soon as the issue at hand has been resolved, they throw the interesting topic to the way-side and reduce the character to a bunch of bondage jokes.
If there's one thing Monster Musume got right, it's the character DESIGN. To say nothing for their nonexistent personalities, the actual look of the characters is very distinctive and detailed. The artwork meshes together well and looks pretty amazing in most scenes. Even the environments around the city look terrific (though the house where generally all the action takes place probably couldn't be more barren looking). But wait... Before we offer too much praise for the character design, writer and illustrator Okayado (aka Takemaru Inui) actually recycled these designs from his erotic dojinshi "Living with Monster Girl" and "Monster Girl Report" series. Does knowing that he reused these characters detract from their design in this show? No, probably not. But it does seem weird that we're watching the same characters from a straight up pornographic comic in a sort of almost but not really pornographic cartoon... Well, okay, maybe not that weird.
In conclusion, Monster Musume seems to spend more time making dick jokes and berating women than it does on character development, which, when you think about it, is a horrible shame, because the genre and the characters both have huge potential to be something phenomenal. You wouldn't think it to look at this show, mind you, but it's there, believe me. But hey, I'm not the one who's sold more than 1 million copies of the manga, so what the hell do I know, right?
