I don’t expect all shows to have this sort of thing, after all part of why I value those things is because of their sparsity within the medium. More often than not I just come across shows that have varying extents of those things and that’s definitely serviceable; I’m not expecting every show I watch to be the next Mushishi or Millennium Actress. Every shows at least nudges some kind of boundary within the medium and that alone is usually somewhat entertaining to watch.
But let me just say that the only boundaries Seiren pushes are the number of fetishes it can pander to. Boobs and ass are the prerequisites, but legs, feet, navels, urophilia, coprophilia, plushophilia, exhibitionism, BDSM, and whatever the scientific term is for arousal from chicks that look like animals.
As I said before Seiren is bizarre, it’s this high school romance show with a mixture of issues that range from inherently poor writing to flatout awful production—the way these episodes are organized and put together don’t even work as a saving grace for the show. Hell even the art quality goes to shit quickly. But this incongruous mixture of issues pulls out a show with just some bizarre moments… Man, I consider myself to have a fairly strong command of the English language, but I can’t help but keep circling back to this same word. It’s not even bizarre in an overt fashion like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure or anything, it’s just these subtle bizarrities that spawn from things like retconning or overall poor writing.
Characters who are introduced to be petty and resentful, and warned about with lines like “oh you don’t want to get on her bad side, otherwise all the girls in the school will be against you” suddenly turn into magnanimous priests who bestow forgiveness upon those whose sins include lying, betrayal and infidelity. Things like that could really be justified with a small shard of personality, but because of lack of oversight it’s not thought about at all, and when they play out towards the end of arcs it just comes off as bizarre.
Another example of a bizarrity within the show that really got me laughing was when Kamita nonchalantly pulls out a fucking PSP from his trousers and starts googling the meaning of words mid-conversation. Like, if the Googling of things mid-conversation isn’t strange enough, why is he doing it on a freakin PlayStation Portable? What happened to smartphones? Then it’s put away and never mentioned again. What the hell? Why include strange things that raise questions and not address them? Who goes to school with a PSP in their trouser pocket?
The shows omnipanderance also compounds onto its already bizarre subtleties, you’ll have a character walking down the street, seemingly musing an innocuous thought that actually turns out to be a BDSM-fetish fantasy, and it’s just dismissed as normal! Where does this come from!?
The protagonist Kamita is a pussy, for a lack of a better word. Actually, there are plenty of better words, but I’m gonna keep calling him a pussy because this major league dork will cum in his pants at the slightest interaction with a girl. Girl does his laundry? Girl brushes her arm against him? Girl shows her bellybutton? Oh this is too much! I’m gonna bust! I legitimately hate Kamita because he represents this trend of anime protagonists that collectively form a malignant tumor within the medium, metastasizing throughout each and every genre whilst promoting this “stuttering, breathless beta-male gets hot chicks” agenda of sorts that is honestly just dreadful. Seriously, fuck this guy.
The show’s 12 episodes are evenly divided into three separate arcs, all involving a different female lead, with the a convenient time reset after each arc ends. This division of episodes is much better in theory than it is in practice, because for some reason studio Gokumi thought it was logical to begin with the best girl and then just regress into more and more generic leads and arcs as the show progresses. The first girl Tsuneki is by far the best in the entire show as she possesses a rare trait the other girls do not: a distinct personality.
Tsuneki is unique and dynamic, a character that exudes confidence and terrifying levels of spontaneity, always keeping you on your toes and wary of her next actions. She’s frisky and intimate, and is a character you won’t easily find in any other high school romance show. What this show does with her and her arc is not only laughably bad, but also just straight up bizarre. After Tsuneki it’s all downhill, the female leads just become more and more generic as the show progresses.
The next girl is Tooru, that one girl who has a smooth voice, and is cool, calm and collected at most times. She’s also a gamer girl, which apparently constitutes “original” in the eyes of studio Gokumi.
The finale female lead, I think her name is Kyoko or something (who actually cares) is by far the most generic; it’s like the writers just gave up at this point. A soft-spoken, innocent childhood friend who’s only meaningful development is understanding that yes, taking a male, childhood friend to shop for lingerie with you is indeed weird, and so is asking him if those rose-coloured panties look good on you.
If you hadn’t already guessed it, one of Seiren’s biggest problems is, like many other anime, pacing. Four episodes doesn’t give anyone much room to work with when trying to develop a natural, romantic relationship between two leads. Trying to replicate something as special as the blooming of love takes care and time, it’s something that stems from allowing characters to bounce thoughts and emotions off of one another and letting intangible things like their chemistry develop naturally. The spontaneity of the first girl, Tsuneki, made that task marginally easier, but four episodes is simply not enough. It’s frankly a little depressing how they took a great character with a stellar character design and an outstanding voice actress and threw it all out the window by trying to rush her whole relationship with Kamita in four episodes.
Seiren is an uninspired, bizarre, clichéd high school romance show that manages to follow virtually every convention one would come to expect from the genre, only ever subverting it in unrealistic, often cringeworthy ways that leave you questioning the bizarrity of what you just watched. It is simply lame, pointless, represents many of the horrible trends in this medium and somehow adds onto that list with its incessant omni-pandering to fetishes. I wouldn’t recommend this show to anybody.
I hope this review was informative and helpful. And maybe got you to smile a bit as well.
