Honestly, at this point, bring on the little sister fetish shows. I at the time thought they were generally as artless as television anime was going to get – utterly lacking in any sort of meaningful character writing or thematic intent, but at the very least siloed within a specific realm of fetish-driven content, proudly offering no reason or incentive for actual critics and art enthusiasts to engage with them. They were valueless, but they were also harmless; a clear reflection of a particular sub-subculture’s fetishization of their difficulties connecting with the opposite sex, nothing more or less.
I was wrong. Dear reader, I was so, so wrong.
Even the original OreImo is frankly more worthy of derision than proud softcore porn like Kiss x Sis. At least Kiss x Sis knows what it is, and offers no pretensions of having anything whatsoever to say about love or life. OreImo offers the far graver sin of attempting to communicate with its audience, to state that the utter intellectual insularity and psychological development-averse world of otaku indulgence is a culture worth dedicating your life to. That a philosophy which should rightfully either be outgrown or at least understood as myopic can instead be your guiding star, your prism for engaging with the world at large. Kiss x Sis is a knowing indulgence of a personal fetish; OreImo is a gilded invitation to a Neverland of perpetual adolescence.
We have seen the fallout of that Neverland becoming the migratory home of a generation of would-be writers. Dispensing with the marginally guiding influence of professional editors, they have taken to the internet, sculpting our current era’s animated fantasies out of fears and fetishes, beloved RPG templates and particularly scandalous doujinshi. From the embers of the little sister fetish era rose the grand phoenix of the slave fetish era, merging with the defeatist, comforting insularity of isekai dramas to craft stories that have given up on engaging with the world altogether. And now their adherents wail for critical validation, oblivious to how few steps they have traveled from Kiss x Sis, or in which direction those dubious steps have taken them.
I’m glad I no longer review anime seasonally, quite frankly. There’s only so many times I can write “this work betrays a fundamental inability to engage with people unlike its author, and a proud validation of that deficiency as some kind of philosophical victory” before I get tired of sweeping sand by the seashore, fully aware my words are landing on either similarly cognizant or willfully deaf ears. What, should I restrain myself to critiquing the craft instead of the content? What craft? The scripting is amateurish, the characters lack interiority beyond what the author either feels personally or half-remembers from Dragon Quest, and any feats of animation dedicated to realizing these tales is merely the polishing and ornamentation of a particularly noxious turd.
To be honest, I wish this was a more complex situation. It would be more interesting if this current wave of fetish-validating media actually had some thematic heft, something to really sink my teeth into. Bakemonogatari is horny as all hell, frequently in ways that would earn you a side-eye from anyone not inculcated into anime’s particular dalliances, and I love that shit! I love the ambiguity of engaging with complex works that reveal all of a creator’s heart, in all their messy and beautiful glory. But the thing is, Nisio Isin can both write and think, and engages in both even in the midst of his most unabashedly indulgent productions. He is witty and thoughtful and deeply interested in people – not just his own interests projected as characters around him, but the multifarious, endless complexity of other people, people his protagonists couldn’t hope to understand. And what Isin doesn’t understand, he desires to – that is the great hope of Monogatari, that we might come to know each other and ourselves, little by little.
This current era of slave fantasies is largely propelled by creators who cannot write, and beyond that cannot really think, only regurgitate. There is no striving to embody the endless beauty of language in their prose, and no curiosity regarding the interiority of others in their stories. You look into their stories and see only their authors, because that is all their authors can see. To audiences who also see themselves in those authors, I suppose such a mirror is a source of validation; to anyone beyond that claustrophobic ken, such stories offer precisely one familiar, repetitive character study and nothing more. I have studied this character. I have assessed its passions and contours, and I have seen precisely how far its empathy and ambition can stretch. I am tired of looking at it.
Given the state of modern seasonal productions, it is actually something of a relief to return to the proud, harmless scandalousness of Kiss x Sis. This OVA knows what it is, and does not pretend to be something more. There is not some great truth of humanity allegedly hiding in its later reaches, no attempts made to pretend indulgence is somehow the seed of insight. No one is going to tell me its feeble gestures towards characterization bely a character study worthy of intellectual engagement. No one is going to get mad if I say it is trash, because trash is what it is happy to be.
And you know what? Kiss x Sis is honestly some perfectly likable trash. It is self-aware enough to know its premise is preposterous, and uses that self-awareness to lighten the tone of its indulgence, inviting its audience to participate in a harmless animated fantasy. Its characters seem to enjoy spending time with each other, and their conversations actually swerve and turn, guided by the guilt-assuaging power dynamics of the protagonist’s extremely forward sisters. Everyone involved seems to actually like sex, which is far more than you can say for the predatory, seemingly vengeful ethos embodied by much of modern isekai. Sex isn’t something you demand from others – it should be a joyfully shared experience, and Kiss x Sis embodies that joy in its every horny aspect.
Frankly, compared to the bitter, often overtly transactional nature of sex as expressed in some modern shows, Kiss x Sis’s fantasies seem almost chaste. Girls in Santa suits singing about how much they love you, occasional flashes of panties, sudden kisses – this stuff isn’t really any more scandalous than Love Hina, reflective of an era where sexual intimacy was yearned for, but not assumed to be some right the protagonist had been denied. Modern fantasies often cannot help but betray a philosophical grounding to their sexual fantasies, a sense that something has gone wrong in the world, and that only a strong, unabashedly predatory man can reaffirm the proper social order. There is none of that in Kiss x Sis – just a dude blubbering his way through horny escapades with two sisters who really, really like him.
So yeah, Kiss x Sis’s second episode proceeds mostly like that, with Santa suits leading into accidental drunkenness, and then an extended gotta-pee adventure that’s sure to thrill all the sister fetish-slash-water sports enthusiasts. The animation is limited, and the show relies heavily on slow pans to further stretch what animation exists, but the character art is consistent and reasonably expressive. I can see now that my astute readers were correct about the particularly fantasy being conveyed here – this is an older sister fetish production, where the calming certainty of a girlfriend who’ll never leave you is interwoven with the “I’ll take care of you” appeal of being coddled by a confident older woman. It’s all furtively horny and eminently harmless, reflecting in its scandalous skinship aspirations an audience that’s likely as guilelessly curious about sex as its protagonists. Porn has no obligation to say anything of substance, and frankly, that’s often for the best. We all have our fantasies – feel free to indulge them, just don’t end up defined by them.
This article was made possible by reader support. Thank you all for all that you do.
A theory on why the webnovel zeitgeist driving the current anime drivel is so resentment-soaked is that it’s being forced to engage with a mainstream it didn’t have to previously. In the days of Kiss x Sis, otaku had the playground pretty much all to themselves, and didn’t feel threatened by any potential “normies” encroaching on their territory. So, fantasies revolved around most everyone involved being goodhearted and a bit hapless at the end of the day. The happy ending is that maybe down the road, everything will be equal and mutual, a world where everyone is winners.
In the modern day of the social media panopticon, otaku are keenly aware of the ways they are watched and judged, and they have feelings about it, to say the least. In the words of My Immortal, “A lot of preps stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.” Their perception of the mainstream as phonies also includes the perception that said phonies will never leave them alone, so now their fantasies must involve beating those power dynamics. The happy ending is domination, a world where there is a clear class of humiliated losers (because, as you point out here, the otaku lacking empathy cannot conceive of reconciliation).
By some metrics, a realm with unchallenged power will have less incidents of conflict than one undergoing factional struggle.
can’t believe it took 6 years but bobduh finally corrected his most grievous error … i know it must not have been easy… so proud… we can all rest a little easier at night 😀 😀 😀
It’s not to surprising that between series like Redo of Healer or even this season’s The Kingdom of Ruin, that there’s a literal cottage industry now for series that’s full of deliberately offending both sides of the political spectrum; one side who would just decry them just for being total smut, and the other side repulsed by the sheer reactionary subtext (or just plain text) of it all. These authors don’t care about who they offend, or even writing good stories, as long as they get the publicity they crave, which they absolutely will. And that’s deeply depressing to think about.
And it’s not like softcore anime are inherently bad. You look at something like Interspecies Reviewers and while on the surface, it’s nothing but smut, it is actually very sympathetic to the sex worker industry and even celebrates it. It’s just that something like this is bound to get more scrutiny unfortunately compared to stuff that is clearly more reactionary (and thus gets more attention from the performative outrage they create).