Tag Archives: Galge

Spring 2020 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

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Look, I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you – this is looking to be a pretty light season in the land of anime. Even in the lead-up to this season, it was already clear that most of the larger hits would be long-running sequels, and series like Re:Zero and Food Wars lost my interest years ago. Then, of course, the coronavirus started sweeping the globe, leading to a number of entirely justified and frankly welcome delays for some of the season’s key properties. Between those extenuating factors and the season’s inherently limited number of high-profile productions, this is turning out to be a light season on the whole, and a fine time to dig into your backlog.

That said, most anime being crap hasn’t stopped me before, and it certainly didn’t stop me this time. I have successfully waded through this season’s mountain of garbage with my mouth wide open, and having sampled all of its sweetly molding flavors, I am now prepared to spit out the choicest morsels for your collective enjoyment. My list here will run from the season’s top contenders down to its worst offenders, with handy tiers and links to longer reviews over at ANN’s preview guide. Let’s review some cartoons!

Oh shit, right, I always do some gimmicky naming scheme for the quality tiers. Uh, let’s do… tiers based on… colors? I guess? Fuck it.

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Brief Aside – The Point of School Days

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Question:

What’s up with School Days?

Bobduh:

It’s an uncomfortably scathing and cynical commentary on the nature of most harems and dating sims. Not a fun ride, but a pretty necessary one.

Most harems exist as sexist power fantasies, relying on the relative inoffensiveness, blandness, or obliviousness of the protagonist, as well as generally a lot of not-taking-themselves-that-seriously, to (theoretically) avoid coming off as creepy and narcissistic. School Days doesn’t do that – School Days plays it straight. It takes a callow, nebbish male protagonist with a weak moral center, and surrounds him with girls with such significant personal issues and such weak self-image that his realizing he can have sex with people just by wanting it and pursuing it makes it actually happen. It’s a relentlessly negative show, but that’s the point – it’s saying that harems are pretty ugly things, and that the circumstances of a harem require a lot of shitty behavior on the part of the guy and a lot of psychological dependency on the part of the girls. By mapping the escapism of harems to characters with actual issues, it acts as a scathing critique of the idea of “winning” girls.

That said, the writing is suspect, the pacing is sluggish in ways that don’t support the material, and the show never actually grapples with its themes, it just exists as a representation of them. The points it makes are a lot more interesting than the package they’re wrapped in.