The story in which this burning car crash plays out is as follows. The protagonist we meet off the bat and are assigned to root for is Issei, a high school student who I was quick to find is neither relatable nor likeable in anything that he says or does. Shunning any academic effort, he opts to spend his days daydreaming about his female classmates and all the lewd things he wants to do to them. His life goal, he says, is to have a harem of them to serve as his sex slaves. Lovely. Accompanied by his two generic best friends, so sparkling in their personality I have genuinely forgotten their names, they seem hell bent on this exact same goal with unrelenting enthusiasm. Like a hysterical exaggeration of a sex offender's mindset, except it's played for laughs and - frighteningly one suspects - audience relatability. Not content with leering at his peers in his head alone, Issei and his friends quite literally spy on girls on the school premises showering and changing naked through a hole in the wall. And here we find the gaping issue with High School DxD that permeates its entire run time - a fascination with treating all female characters on screen as meat, and the relentless indulgence in completely unnecessary shots of fully animated naked breasts contorting like water balloons rolling around a dashboard.
The plot, which I hesitate to describe as a plot because it is so chaotically interchangable and clumsily crafted, follows Issei's unfortunate reeling into a paranormal conflict between three factions of the afterlife. These are Angels, Fallen Angels, and Devils. Each have unique traits and world conquering objectives to further their cause, each should have a thematically recognisable style but look identical in their attire - high school massacre casual wear for boys, revealing fetish gear for the girls. Issei manages to die after being murdered by a Fallen Angel on a date, which sadly does not end the show but through his resurrection and involuntary induction to the Devil's faction he is reborn and granted powers via a Yu-Gi-Oh deck holder on his arm that farts its catchphrase 'BOOST-O' when he charges it up to fight members of the other factions with it. We are assured this is a greatly powerful gift but Issei spends a lot of time getting beaten to a pulp regardless, which I found to be one of the very few things I momentarily enjoyed in watching the show. Issei is taken under the wing of Rias, the red haired leader of the Devil faction masquerading as a student at the school leading an occult club. To me Rias is, to put it quite simply, an incredibly boring and one dimensional character. Her robotic settings are either confident mother role playing concern for her injured friends, or frowny faced vampire mumbling nondescript concerns for her family honour and ordering her peons (also bestowed the gift of two robotic personality settings each) to do asanine preparation tasks for the next inevitable fight with a rival faction. Despite this Issei finds her captivating, which like all the women around him is once again down to how disproportionately large her breasts are. This is actually considered the pull of the show in lieu of an engaging or interesting plot.
Said plot escalates as factions collide, Issei learns new random abilities because the narrative dictates he has to suddenly progress, new members join (including an incredibly annoying healing nun named Asia who literally shuns her lifelong holy pilgrimage to go on adventures with Issei and pals within 24 hours of meeting them) and generally participate in set piece battles for the remainder of the season. So without going into too much detail, that's the gist of the plot. A plot riddled with confusing branches, nonsensical overreactions and bafflingly minor arcs fanfared as epic milestones that have no effect. But what of the show as a whole?
Well to be perfectly honest I think it's a horrible mess. A parade of wholeheartedly unrelatable and unlikeable characters bereft of reasonable thought or logic pepper the audience with their repetitive and predictable lines, each character dutifully following a set stereotypical trait they are glued to for the duration of the season. Characters like Issei and Asia make bewildering changes in opinion for seemingly no reason - Issei particularly has borderline schizophrenic suicide pact attachments to characters he has barely been acquainted with on naming terms mere hours ago.
So there is no character development or cohesive plotline to get invested in, for the first season at least. I won't be watching further. A problem that can be overlooked if there is some redeeming factor elsewhere. But in High School DxD, the only factor they want the audience focussed on is the breasts of its female characters. The number of seedy, crudely explicit breast and upskirt panty shots is simply staggering. All combat leads to the tearing of clothing to reveal exaggerated breast physics animation, as if it is contractually obligational to take any opportunity possible to remove an item of clothing and escalate the scenario to a gratuitous and tedious breast close up. It isn't funny. It isn't arousing. It's crass.
The lofty level of respect High School DxD has for the human form is somewhere beneath the Mariana Trench and ignited frequent head shaking in disbelief as I watched the grimy, leering, perverse cacophony play out. The entire show feels genuinely unclean. It's
uncomfortable to watch and relentless perversion permeates every single episode, to a quite concerning degree as if the entire thing was made under duress by an escaped sex offender to an innocent animator held at gunpoint.
In conclusion, High School DxD is a terrible anime. A contrived attempt to normalise what is essentially Netflix friendly hentai, the show had me laughing throughout - not out of enjoyment, but in its face. For its sensationally unapologetic misogyny. For its bumbling plot threads changed at a moment's notice for convenience. For its insulting treatment of its own audience. After Spirited Away won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2003, just how the hell did we regress to this within a decade?
