This is an anime about um… well… I’m not quite sure. It centers around this small boarding house in Japan that has for whatever reason attracted an ensemble of severely mentally ill/socially awkward women. They consider themselves a sisterhood and pretty much an island from normal society. All of them are in general, ugly, insane, worthless drains on society. (I believe one of them has a job.)
The main character is a teenage girl named Tsukimi who moved in recently. Being the main character means that she has to be grounded closer to the normal end of the spectrum than the others so that normal people watching the show can at least be in the general vicinity of common ground. (Like how in chick flicks, when the protagonist is supposed to be a nerd/dork or social outcast and they basically take a super hot actress, put glasses on her and make her run into poles occasionally and call it accurate.) She’s not actually ugly, her agoraphobia isn’t as severe and the only creepy quirk she has is her bizarre hardon for jellyfish. She’s completely obsessed with them. I guess she associates them with her dead mother who used to take her to the aquarium.
One night she meets a girl and brings her back to the apartment. (No, not like that, you pervert.) Turns out the girl is actually a dude in drag. Tsukimi freaks out because men aren’t allowed in the building. She tries to send him on his way but he keeps showing up at the doorstep from then on, always dressed in full drag, very fashionably and with makeup on. I guess the joke is that this guy is more attractive, fashionable and feminine than the rest of the female cast, not that the bar was set all that high. I mean, seriously, they look like a re-imagining of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids if they were female and Japanese. 
I think what pisses me off most about the characters is that I can’t see their eyes. Occasionally in anime you’ll have maybe one megadork character with stupid spiral lens glasses that they never take off but this is three main characters whose eyes you never see. Oh and speaking of glasses, the one with glasses who looks like the teacher from SZS has about five lines in the whole show.
Mayaya always dresses in a track suit and gestures like Bruce Lee in a fighting stance. They actually make a reference to this in the slough of movie references in the intro. When I say she gestures like that, I mean she does it all the fucking time. It is literally her resting pose. She can’t just stand like a normal person. This is one of those things that people might be able to accept in anime but when you start trying to apply it to reality, you suddenly realize just how stupid it is. Have you ever run to school with toast in your mouth or held a popsicle in your mouth with no hands. Try it That shit get’s messy really fast, it starts to hurt from the cold and you look like a moron. Have you ever smiled at someone happily with your eyes closed? Try it. You’ll be booked as a sex offender by the end of the day. Now can you imagine going through your day-to-day routine in a constant Jeet Kune Do stance?
This would have been the part where I photoshopped several images of Bruce Lee in the same pose, going through his daily routine but I’m too lazy.
Anyway, the actual plot goes something like this. Kuronoske’s family is actually extremely wealthy. His dad and half brother are both stodgy local government officials. Needless to say, his crossdressing isn’t really appreciated all that well at home. That being said it actually surprised me that he got very little flak for his deviant behavior, especially being in a family of politicians. On top of that, he’s actually an illegitimate child. I don’t know what the media is like in Japan but in the US that shit would be flying all over the tabloids if word got out, possibly having a negative effect on your career so you’d want to keep a pretty short leash on Kuranosuke. But the worst he ever gets is groans and eyerolls. In a realistic scenario he probably would have been kicked to the curb the day he was born but again maybe it’s different in Japan with a collectivist society.
His brother Shu is sort of their father’s protege, straitlaced and boring as a contrast to Kuranosuke. One day at their immaculate mansion, he sees Tsukimi leaving and becomes interested in her. Kuranosuke seems to want to set them up and takes both of them to the aquarium. Tsukimi ends up crying when she sees the jellies and hugs Shu. He hugs back and then they sort of have a moment. Kuranosuke gets kind of jealous when he sees them. If you’re jealous then stop trying to set them up, you dumbass. At this point, you’re liable to think that there is some kind of love triangle forming or at least some bonding of some sort but no. Shu and Tsukimi barely interact for the rest of the show and Tsukimi and Kuranosuke never really get any further than they are this moment.
There’s nothing wrong with having platonic relationships but either have them or don’t have them. Don’t sort of allude to a more than friends relationship and then never follow up on it like you forgot you were doing it or something. The whole show is like that. They start doing something and then get distracted and never mention it again.
Shu’s part of a committee in talks deciding whether to approve a neighborhood refurbishing program which would include tearing down the shithole that all of those freaks live in and putting in something nice. The person heading the proposal for the committee is a young woman who it is implied is placed in that position as bait/sex appeal. She gets close to Shu, has a drink with him, puts roofies in his drink, brings his unconscious body to a hotel, gets in bed with him and takes a picture of them together in bed. They didn’t do anything but he doesn't know that. It’s a blackmail scheme to use as leverage to greenlight the project. (So this is what it takes to start a scandal in Japan.) This was seriously their game plan for the proposal from square one? Why didn’t they just propose it and see how it panned out and then maybe consider doing illegal shit if it fails and it’s really all that important to them. This might have made sense if they had established beforehand that Shu was very likely to kill the program but they didn’t. As far as I know, he had no strong opinions about it whatsoever so why do this?
Over the course of the show, this woman is holding this picture over his head to get him to basically do whatever she wants. She gets him to introduce her to his father and go out on mock dates with her. There’s really no mention of the program again. She just appears to be dicking around. On one of these mock dates he gets pissed and tells her off before leaving. She gets depressed and drunk dials him later that night with a slurred voice, passing out on the phone. He gets worried for some reason. (Oh no, that bitch that’s been constantly manipulating me and threatening to ruin my career might be in trouble. How terrible.) He shows up at her place and finds her on the sofa posed with a big bottle of pills. Unfortunately she’s not actually dead. Surprise, they’re vitamins! Funny joke! He slaps her in the face and leaves. Later, during a soliloquy, she reveals to the audience that she has a crush on him. Oh, you have a crush on him. My silly mistake. See for some reason I got the idea that you were just being a complete fucking psychopath. I’m glad you cleared that up for me.
How am I supposed to believe that she likes him? At what point did she indicate or express any fondness for him? When did he ever reciprocate similar feelings beside out of the fucking blue when he checked on her? This can be one or both of only two things: an accurate look into a serious psychological issue that she has and/or it’s the most shittly written relationship development I’ve ever seen. In fact, shittily written relationship development all around. If she actually likes him then she should show it by not blackmailing him. Her character had the potential to turn a corner by deleting the picture and relenting but she never even considers it. She comes down hard on him and doesn’t yield at any point. What is she even trying to accomplish? She never says anything about the program. She just seems to be acting like a sociopathic child torturing a puppy for thrills. Does she actually want a relationship with Shu now? Can you imagine what that would be like?
“So how did you two meet?”
“Funny story, see she drugged and kidnapped me and then took pictures to try and blackmail me. Now we’ve been together three years and she’s still trying to blackmail me.”
Red flags! Red flags everywhere!
At one point, a private eye gets hired to tail Shu to see what the hell’s going on with this lady and again you think, oh man, shit’s gonna go down now. And again you’d be wrong. It doesn’t.
Kuranosuke figures out about the proposal for the neighborhood refurbishing and tells the freaks. Then he makes a plan to collect money by selling their assets so that they can buy the building and save it from being bulldozed. He makes them all start going to the proposal meetings. He also gives them all makeovers so that they don’t give everyone eye cancer when they walk in the door. Even after the makeovers, you still can’t see their eyes.
They can’t scrape together all that much because they're unwilling to part with their shit. They set up a booth at a flea market and discover that Tsukimi’s homemade jellyfish doll becomes a hot item instantly. (I don’t know. It’s Japan.) They quickly begin mass producing them for their booth but once more we really never see where this leads. Maybe you could say that it’s a precursor for the part where Tsukimi and Kuranosuke team up to design a stupid-looking jellyfish dress which actually gets some notoriety at a big fashion show. But it ultimately has the same conclusion so who cares?
One of the big problems with this show is that everyone is unrealistically accepting of their circumstances. There should have been a lot more tension than there was. Shu should have been torn between his blackmailer heading the restructuring proposal and his brother who is friends with the people that the project directly affects. Shu should also resent him in general for being the lovechild of his dad’s affair which ruined his parent’s marriage and gave him a phobia of women. Kuranosuke should have been put under pressure by his father to stop his cross-dressing antics from both intolerance and fear of it effecting his own career.
Nothing gets resolved at the end. Shu still thinks that he slept with an insane person. The freaks never figure out that Kuranosuke is a guy and don’t get over their aversion to men. Their scheme to raise money never accomplishes anything. Their successfully designed dress never accomplishes anything. The PI investigation never accomplishes anything. Tsukimi’s relationship with Shu or Kuranosuke never goes anywhere or does anything. The building owner tells the freaks that she won’t be selling so the place can’t be bulldozed anyway which essentially makes what little conflict they were able to establish, completely pointless.
So the whole story can be pretty much be summarized like this: some people are kind of trying to demolish this building and the people that live there are kind of trying stop them and OH LOOK, A BIRD!
The story is so wishy washy and ill defined. No one ever just has a clear cut logical motive for their actions. No one follows through with anything. Nothing that happens has impact on anything else. Make Shu noticeably against the restructuring. Make the project leader blackmail him to get his support. Make her either a cutthroat business woman who doesn’t care or make her start to like him and then decide to stop blackmailing him. If she continues blackmailing him then make buying the building a feasible solution to save it. Then make Tsukimi’s stupid ugly jellyfish dress save the day. Good stories require a visible dilemma or a visible sense of conflict. That’s how you get people invested. That’s how you get people to care. That’s how you don’t leave everyone blueballed at the end, wondering if there was supposed to be a message to the story or even if it constitutes a story at all. 
