1. It's a comedy/ It's not serious it's supposed to be funny!
2. It's a show for Kids! Geez lighten up.
3. It's deeper than you think, you don't understand the show or don't know enough about the genre!
I can see why some people might be inclined to immediately offer some of these arguments especially the second one in terms of a defense for media like this. I just don't really see most of them as a viable defense of either show upon further scrutiny.
The thing about comedy is and I know this is going to be a ground breaking thought... It has to be funny. The problem is I just don't really find anything in this show funny. The situations they get in aren't well crafted jokes, they aren't jokes based off well established characters or a setting within the show, they aren't parodying a specific genre of anime or something else and they don't really offer anything of substance aside from these extremely obvious ways you can milk comedy. Even the randomness and the absurdity of the show seems anti-humor as it constantly negates the somewhat unique on paper premise of the show and mires it in constant cliches and ordinary situations. At least Ren & Stimpy could sometimes pull a laugh with it's random humor, Log Log Log. About the only joke I found funny in this is the constant uselessness of the "ninja" character, because it gave me a small pretense of consistent character and a running gag. Pretty much everything else fell flat in terms of comedy. I think I should further emphasize the fact that the show really does not do anything good with it's initial premise, it seems like it would be rather easy to think up comedic situations that revolve around an assassin doing everyday things, but the show seems almost determined to not do anything funny with this idea. I've seen non-comedy shows have more humor around a serious subject like this, than I did in this "comedy" show. Now even with all that going wrong they might have been able to find a joke in the unrelated to the premise situations that they do depict, but the show seems inept at even doing that. I'd like to be able to say "I can see how someone else can enjoy this but I just personally cant," or some kind of fair statement to that effect but I just cant really, nor do I want to imagine the grown-up person who finds any of this funny or enjoyable.
Which leads me to that second defense, in the case of Ren & Stimpy I do believe the creators of the show originally intended it to be for kids, so fair enough for them on this one I guess, but at least here in the west the only people I have ever seen talk about Kill Me Baby is teens and adults. The premise of the show regardless of whether they take advantage of it or not, seems to exclude children as an audience as I'm not sure how funny kids are supposed to find an assassin being in a school doing ordinary things. Now you can say this isn't the shows fault, I've seen some bad marketing for shows in various regions, for some reason in my area of America, One Punch Man is being marketed to extremely young kids, even though I think the premise of the show and it's main "gag" would go right over their little heads as they haven't really seen what it is supposed to be a parody of. Nothing about Kill Me Baby seems especially conducive or appealing to children in a similar manner and as such I just don't really accept this as a defense. I guess you can say it's art style is childish, but I'd just call it bad. As a staple of bad Animation, every three episodes or so you get a few creative shots, but on a whole it just looks bad and unappealing.
One of the main reasons I wanted to compare this show to Ren and Stimpy was I think the two main characters have a vary similar dynamic. Ren is the straight man who has a violent streak towards his friend, but is usually the grounded one in most situations unless they try to do a "comedic" heel turn and have him be wrong about something in favor of Stimpy being right. Stimpy is an annoying grotesque dummy who is constantly annoying and wrong about everything and this is supposed to be balanced out by small moments of charm where Stimpy seems like the nicer one. Sonya is basically Ren and Yasuna is basically Stimpy, but the dynamic is slightly more lopsided in that Sonya seems more grounded in reality than Ren and Yasuna is the worst character ever conceived of by a human. Now some people might think I'm exaggerating a bit but the annoyingness of the Yasuna character honestly almost broke me mentally and physically and I almost quit watching this show several times. Now this is where the defenders of the show might say "Yeah but she is supposed to be annoying!" Well this is where I'll say that sometimes you can succeed a little too much in the bad traits of a character. To now reference another thing I'm sure no one on this site cares about, a few years ago I watched the horror movie "The Babadook." On a technical level I thought the movie was pretty good and there was even a lot of good to say about the story and general metaphorical arc of the movie, the problem with this movie though and the reason I'll probably never watch it again despite it's accomplishments in most cinematic areas is the fact that a lot of the movie is filled with a kid being as annoying and needy as possible to his single and already stressed mother. Now similar to Kill Me Baby this kid was supposed to be annoying in fact I'd say it was a key part of the plot and his characterization and the young actor deserves a lot of credit for his acting at his age, but he was too convincing at being annoying to the point that it transcended the movie and just started annoying me in real life. Kill Me Baby has a similar problem, I stopped caring that Sonya was annoyed because I was annoyed by Yasuna near constantly. Annoyance is something that needs balance in something like this, you want to do it enough that it's convincing to the situation the characters are in, but if you do it too much it's just starts actually annoying people. I would say Yasuna is the single worst aspect of the show and taking her out would improve it by about a thousand or so notches. I mean it still wouldn't be funny and enjoyable, but at least I wouldn't have to hear her voice for another second.
Lets examine the last defense now, the "you just don't get it defense." Well despite people saying this I didn't see anything particularly deep or meaningful about this show, nor was there any kind of meta-commentary within about anime as a genre or specific anime sub-genres. I think parodying something or doing a meta-commentary might give us too much easy humor to milk and the last thing this show ever seems to want you to do is laugh. It doesn't really touch upon any themes or broad ideas within it's subject matter. It doesn't even aim for the typical cliches a show might aim for like this in Anime like "Yasuna just wants too cool for school work oriented Japanese people to enjoy life." It cant even rise up to the level of tired cliches of that nature. At the end of day, I can give a million other examinations, refutations, observations and intellectual masturbation's about this show and some guy can come along and say "you still don't le get it." I can offer that as a defense of almost anything bad in media that has even the slightest bit of information to make murky peoples attempts to decipher it. I'll go one further though and say I don't even really care if I "got" this show and it's supposed depth or not, on a surface level it is bad enough for me to just dismiss any kind of perceived depth that might exist within it's horridly annoying innards.
This show is the equivalent of having a person poking you in the ear and eyes with a sharp stick and every time you show the mildest amounts of displeasure, a neckbeardian to the side of you constantly tells you to just to enjoy it. Well, I just cant. Happy Happy Joy Joy.
