Reviews

This is the kind of show that, if written by a man, would’ve been rightly viewed as an incel fantasy about having a submissive, underaged fuckdoll. However, it’s written by a woman, so it should therefore be viewed as a controlling female fantasy about a short, maidenly goody two-shoes healing her tall, rich, handsome man-baby whose emotionally vulnerability pushes him to rely on her for everything, gazing at no woman other than her. Most of the anime community is male, and most of these men aren’t exactly rolling in women, so the resulting subculture is one that has a warped, rose-tinted view of female literature. You’ll often hear people express sentiments like: “Anime is misogynistic. Most anime and manga authors are otaku manchildren, and all they want is to create female characters who appeal to their perverted fantasies.” Indeed, these opinions may seem hard to dispute, because while the part about the entire medium being misogynistic is debatable, the part about male authors often not knowing how to write female characters definitely isn’t. However, my personal favorite is this: “Men are not socialized to recognize uncomplicated, unsexual fondness for a female character, and their association with fiction proves this.” Say whatever you want about contemporary ideology cultivating the belief that men are primitive beasts who should be degraded into thinking of themselves as rapist monsters—I’m not trying to start irrelevant controversy here—but this opinion is the epitome of what I’m talking about. The people of this community, both the outnumbered girls and the boys who outnumber them, simply know nothing of popular female literature.

There are literary masterpieces written by women just as there are literary masterpieces written by men (I hope that goes without saying), but there’s a very glaringly obvious reason that—oh, I don’t know—the Fifty Shades of Grey book series sold over 150 million copies worldwide. Let me ask, have you ever read any manga aimed at Japanese women? Literally 99% of them feature women embracing traditional roles and following the lead of a dashing older man, 99.9% of their doujins foster smutty dreams about being submissive fuckdolls, and anything which doesn’t feature a female MC is almost guaranteed to be fujoshi trash. When I went to go see Promare, the theater wasn’t filled with old-ass Gainax nerds hyped about the next big Imaishi project. It was filled with teenage girls shrieking at the screen, acting just as obsessive, shameless, and depraved as ANY male otaku I’ve EVER seen at ANY idol concert. Gosh, just thinking about what the theatre audience must be like for My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission makes my skin crawl. Now listen. I’m not trying to make this a competition, but the point is made: BOTH sexes are filled with antisocial degenerates possessed with lurid fantasies and their own preferences for fanservice. This might shock you, but different women have different tastes and different forms of pandering media. Some like, "being swept away by a domineering ikemen who competes with other ikemen to claim my heart and bend me over,” and others like, “healing a broken boy so he falls in love with me instead of one of those other sluts competing for his attention.” Taisho Otome Otogibanashi just happens to fall in the latter category.

And I’m not saying any of this to detract from the show. If you can tell a compelling story based around fetishistic wish-fulfillment, that’s awesome. I just wanted to articulate the fact that, yes, this show is rooted in trashy sexual fantasies, just not the male kind which you may be tempted to think. The real reason I’m giving this show such a low score is much more simple: it’s just boring and ugly. Yuzuki Tachibana, our lovely fourteen year old protagonist, gets sold and married off to Tamahiko Shima, the seventeen year old edgelord who’s totally not just going through a phase, Mom, I swear! Seriously, the first episode opens with this edgy grainy filter and overdramatic letterbox over the entire screen while Tamahiko narrates his tragic backstory, and the second Yuzu shows up on screen, the grainy filter and letterboxed margins disappear. At that moment I realized this show would continue to have the subtlety of a brick to the face, and this is a problem not only with the symbolism, but also with every character and every single piece of dialogue. Its historical setting can be mildly interesting in ways I’ll talk about in a second, but the actual elements of the show just come across like those of a generic, modern day highschool romcom. If you’re comfortable viewing this as the non-pornographic fetish-fantasy which it’s clearly supposed to be for reasons aforementioned, then great, but that’s not what I signed up for, and if you don’t feel like projecting yourself onto the submissive maiden or the edgy boy in need of your womanly healing, what you’re left with is two boring, one-dimensional characters whose dramatic backstories add little to the tedium of their lives.

Its presentation is also terribly lackluster, and since the animation itself is pretty shoddy, the whole show often borders on being downright ugly. The color design just ruins everything. I never thought I’d live to see the day where I recommend Demon Slayer of all things, but that show legitimately does have a much better color scheme to fit the Taisho era (it’s also a convenient example to use because literally everyone has seen it). In the manga, everyone’s hair and clothes are shaded with much deeper and darker blacks, but everything in the anime has a color palette leaning more toward grey, and the whole show just looks kind of washed out as a result. However, while I still think it looks bad on an artistic level, it was this hazy presentation which got me thinking about something much more interesting, and the only element of this show which I actually really liked. This show is called Taisho Otome Otogibanashi, A Taisho Maiden’s Fairytale, and the more I watched, the more I got the feeling this title was supposed to be interpreted not simply as a romantic hook to bait viewers in, but as a literal description of the story, because in context, the show itself feels like a fairy tale. Taisho Otome Otogibanashi, the manga, has a sequel called Showa Otome Otogibanashi, and in it, the two lovers meander around a rapidly radicalizing imperial society, deeply depressed, and actively wanting to commit double suicide, and while we were comparing that manga with this one on /a/, someone posted this greentext as a joke:
>extremely cute and vanilla love story
>followed by an edgy as fuck sequel where main characters want to kill themselves
>extremely liberal and democratic era
>followed by an edgy as fuck era where everyone becomes imperialist war criminals
Now, while this greentext did directly inspire the thematic interpretation I’m about to discuss, it’s also extremely reductionist. Describing Taisho as an “extremely liberal and democratic era” is over-stating things a lot. It's definitely true that the Taisho period saw a lot of political and social movements towards liberal democracy and attempts at government reform, but on the whole, the era is better characterized as chaotic and unstable, plus these movements and reforms never really coalesced into any lasting form, all the while suppression acts like the Peace Preservation Law were being passed in order to consolidate power away from the people and more toward police and military factions. This is why from the turn of the 19th century all the way up until the end of the war, the technological development of the Japanese countryside was nearly a century behind that of the cities, because all their resources were being devoted to capitalizing on the nationalism of the Meiji Restoration, industrializing the nation’s heartland, and modernizing the nation’s military—which the government had long since lost control over—for the sole purpose of creating and expanding an empire and becoming a world power as quickly and aggressively as humanly possible, over a hundred years after the initial industrial revolution took place, leaving the old isolationist Japan in the dust. The history lesson I’m giving you right now may feel exhaustive for a MAL review, especially one concerning a fetish show like this, but I promise this is all relevant.

The earthquake featured in episodes ten and eleven was a real event called The Great Kanto Earthquake. In the show, we’re treated to scenes of everyone coming together, hugging it out, and aiding in the relief effort, but in real life, ultranationalist cells among the military police force in the city center were working with civilian vigilantes to take advantage of the chaos and use it as a pretext to massacre political dissidents and commit ethic cleansing against thousands of Koreans living in the region. Thinking about it more soberly, Taisho would be better described as an era of idealism and hope for change, and this is why I feel this story works so well as a literal fairy tale (otogibanashi) of the Taisho era. Considering the fetishistic nature of the series I discussed in the first two paragraphs, it can also be said that, in a meta sense, this show acknowledges the proliferation of smutty literature that occurred throughout Taisho. A great deal of erotic poems and stories got popular as a result of the influx of laxer social standards, and the increased popularity of female authors also had a huge impact since libidinous poetry was especially popular among female readership. On top of all of this, it was also the era in which love marriages started to be more idealized over arranged marriages, which is obviously a huge theme in this particular story. I don’t know, maybe I’m overthinking this and giving the author WAY too much credit, but either way, I think it’s a cool way to view the series, because as far as simple naming schemes go, it's honestly really clever. Now we just need Heisei Otome Otogibanashi about a loveless marriage between a salaryman and a sengyo-shufu. Forget historical commentary, the doujins practically write themselves.

Thank you for reading.