Princess Jellyfish

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.  

Corpse Party

Corpse Party... What a great name. What the hell kind of game could it possibly be? Obviously from Japan. A Mario Party-like game with zombies? Or like one of those Imagine or Idol M@ster games where you dress up your zombie and teach them to sing by performing rhythm games? I could spend hours trying to guess but that would be moronic because I already know what it is. It's a horror game on the PSP that was localized from Japan recent-ish and only available on the Playstation Network for English speaking players. It's kind of a visual novel and it's kind of not. Most of the dialogue and action scenes are in visual novel form but you also control your character, walking around in real time as a sprite in a top-down view, making it look like a Final Fantasy title on the Super Nintendo. The game dialogue is still spoken in Japanese but the text is translated so it's just like watching something with subtitles.

Skelly tan is ready for her rehearsal!

It all starts with a group of highschool friends preforming a charm ritual which is common slice of life anime bullshit. They somehow botch the ritual and the lot of them gets spirited away to the legendary haunted elementary school which used to stand on the very spot of their own highschool. (Because I haven't had enough of walking around in haunted Japanese schools yet.) Heavenly Host Elementary just happens to be a nexus of overlapping dimensions which the students got scattered throughout. They're essentially in the same place but can't really interact with each other unless they're in the same space. So the goal is to somehow figure out why you're there, regroup with your friends and escape back to reality.

There are five chapters which you unlock as you go and it jumps around to different groups of students. I am really bad with names and faces in life and about twice as bad with names in a foreign language. Even now having played through the whole game about 1.5 times I can't recall with certainty a single character's name.


In the first half of the game you're stuck in pretty much the same area of the school which gets really monotonous. They really needed to dole out the new areas a little more evenly because they're pretty much all crammed into the second half of the game. They didn't even utilize the East wing to it's full potential. Like what the hell was up with the piano and the migrating marble bust?


So you explore looking for people and keys, solving simple puzzles and collecting... student IDs off of dead students you come across? The bodies are from several different schools from junior high and up. At first I thought this aspect was kind of weird like something only a serial killer would do but then I thought about it and realized that these are all missing persons with families. It's not like a serial killer's trophy, it's like grabbing someone's dog tags. Assuming you make it out alive, you have a list of all these missing people who you can confirm as dead. Then I thought about it some more and realized that that would be pointless because if you die in the school, all memory of you is erased from reality. So, no, I was right. It's like a serial killer trophy. What's even weirder is that on the game's title screen there's a catalog of all the IDs you've found with a picture of the body and a cause of death. Reminds me of Tyler Durden's "human sacrifice" wall except less... yeah...


You meet spirits, some of which want to kill you and you have to do something to appease them or just run from them to escape. Occasionally you'll have to make a decision that may affect the ending you get. It's pretty immediate and upfront about letting you know that you made the wrong choice by having someone die. Then it gives you the "wrong ending" game over screen. I don't know about other people but I TRY to get these because there are several different ones and they're interesting. But I think it's stupid that if you make a choice that gets someone killed, it results in a game over when the canon plot itself involves people in your party dying. So only specific people are aloud to die and at the prescribed time. What the hell is the difference? Why is it that when one person dies we have to start over but when another dies we just move on and try to forget? I should be able to finish the game with one person missing an eye and half their arm. That would be awesome. I think the only game I've ever played where you could get playable characters killed and then just keep playing on without them was Fire Emblem.

On the game's status screen you see character avatars in your current party appearing exactly like your typical JRPG and it shows "HP 30/30." This really confused me when I first saw it because it implies that your characters can sustain damage. It makes it look like you can fight enemies in the game. Well, you can't. As it turns out, during the entire game there are only two instances I've found where you can get injured versus get killed instantly, (which is the norm.) One is where there is hazardous stuff on the floor that hurts you if you walk on it. The other is your first encounter with a hostile ghost. So there you go, characters have hit points because... not really any reason. 

Way too often it seems that the game cheats you out of rendered images that you should be seeing when something is happening in the game. The screen turns black except for the dialogue box and it's suddenly reduced to a text game or a choose your own adventure book where you're literally just reading a description of what is going on. There is a time and place for books. If you're watching a subtitled kung-fu movie it is not okay for the screen to just go black during a fight scene and leave you reading a description with nothing else to see. It is a disservice to the medium. It's called a "visual novel" because it's fucking VISUAL. Every time this happens all I can think about afterwards is wow, that scene would have been a lot better with some actual illustrations or even just the sprites or even just ANYTHING but a blank screen!


As you progress, you notice that dialogue and exposition seem to be slowly nudging gameplay out of the door. Then you get to chapter five and find that it's a car door and gameplay has been officially shoved into the road and backed over a couple of times to make certain it's dead. You can't take two steps anymore without a fifty line conversation. Shut up. Shut up. Oh my God, SHUT UP! This is the problem with making it a hybrid puzzle/visual novel game. You see the puzzle part and naturally that's what you want to do because it's more engaging but they keep slapping your hands away and hiding it behind their back. No, no! Finish your incredibly thick and tedious dialogue first and maybe we'll let you lick the gameplay spatula later. Nearly the first hour of chapter five is talking with no significant break in between whatsoever.  



Playing with no walkthrough, I got the Groundhog Day ending which is obviously bad so I needed to change something to get the true ending of the game because I require validation for my efforts. But for the first time I didn't know what I did wrong because it wasn't made immediately evident like the other times. Well in short... everything. I needed to start over from the beginning of the chapter because my three separate saves didn't stretch back far enough to salvage it. Fantastic. On top of that, I need to experience about another hour of exposition. Find all the notes, talk to crazy dead bitch 1, get the statue to open the infirmary, listen to crazy dead bitch 2, meet crazy dead bitch 3, chant this many times, give her this and this but not these, go backwards through the maze, escape the building before time runs out. Holy shit. It's easier to swim to the moon than it is to get out of Heavenly Host. This place just has to be filled with the most pedantic and anal retentive ghosts ever. And ultimately when you think about it the whole reason anyone comes here is because they do the ritual wrong which in this case constituted repeating the chant the wrong number of times. That's it. That was enough to piss off the ghosts. Escaping is like going into the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle. If you blink funny, then you're fucking dead. 


During the last dialogue of the game in where we remember our dead peers who all died horribly and who's existence was completely erased from reality except in the memories of the survivors, one of those generic tie-in J-pop singles begins to play. You know, the ones they tend to play in romantic slice of life anime where the MC and the love interest have a moment and the writers scramble to finish the relationship development that they forgot to do over the next three minutes before stopping just short of any sort of resolution? One of those. Except they also seem to play them any time they can get away with too, including this time. Sappy upbeat J-pop! Good for graduations, weddings, fight scenes, and funerals! 

If I had made this game the end credits would have a blooper reel like in the first Silent Hill game and it would be set to Oingo Boingo's Dead Man's Party because it's just so obvious.

♫ I'm all dressed up with nowhere to go~

Do do do do do do do do do do do dooooo ♫

Kodomo No Jikan

This show is retarded… Though I knew I would hate it from square one. The plot is centered around this wuss teacher that just started teaching a third grade classroom at a new school. Actually I think it’s his first time teaching ever. So naturally the students walk all over him for about the first half of the series and then it becomes slightly lessened. The other main characters are these three school girls…
This whore, who flat out asks the teacher to do her. (I’m not even exaggerating.) Sixty percent of her is made of hair. She’s the main girl and “love interest.” Keep in mind that she’s in 3rd grade. The whole show is based on this fucked up relationship that can’t happen. The whole point is that the girl wants to go out with the teacher and the teacher is trying to keep her at arm’s length and himself out of trouble.

This violent dyke bitch. She has a crush on Whore because apparently there was some mandate in Japan recently put into effect that requires all anime to contain pointless homosexual themes. She wears the stupidest shit to school.

Who would have not just one but two sets of different ears? Are the black ears her formal ears? A polka-dot bowtie? And a parasol? Really? This is why schools have uniforms. Kids are too fucking retarded to dress themselves. She’s verbally and physically abusive to the teacher, basically making her one of the worst characters ever. On multiple occasions she kicks him hard in the crotch. I don’t know what the deal is at *this* school but where I come from if you pull that shit once you’re gone. Dyke is conflicted with being secretly in love with Whore and Whore being in love with the teacher.

These huge glasses. She’s the normal nice one. The only point of her existing is so people like me have a non-shitty character to identify with.

So on the new teacher’s first day he walks into his homeroom only to find that all the girls in his class are changing clothes there. Why they don’t change in the locker room is a mystery. Maybe it’s a special ed classroom? Whore of course doesn’t mind being seen nude by anyone at any time. Though at first she’s apprehensive about him but 15 minutes later she wants to have his children. Queue the NSFW comments and sexual harassment. The worst part of this is the teacher’s stupid reactions. Sometimes he’ll get mad and chase her. Sometimes he’ll just blush and stammer. There are never any consequences for anything. Everyone’s free to kick or fondle his crotch at their discretion. In reality he should just tell her to shut the fuck up or go see the principal.

There is a female teacher that is meant to be the obviously reasonable choice in relationships. Whore is jealous of her because she not only detracts attention from her but is superior in every way. Though every time they plan on doing something together he always runs off like a dumbass. And it’s always because of Whore. They’re about to leave to go drinking and he’ll go, “Hey, who’s that? Is that Whore? What’s she doing? Looking out of a window? Awesome! I’m so there!” Then he’ll amble away with no explanation at all to his date about where he’s going or what the fuck he’s doing.

After a while Whore becomes a clingy stalker. The teacher finally sets her straight on the *I‘m going to prison if you continue to touch me* issue. Of course she doesn‘t care. She gets pissed off and mopey when anyone sees her for what she really is; a manipulative child and an asshole. Yes you’re a kid; deal with it.

Later she decides to dress up like a boy because she notices that boys get to crawl all over him during recess. So she dyes her hair black and shoves it into the back of her shirt to make it look shorter. Apparently there is some sort of wormhole in her shirt that leads to an alternate dimension because I think her extra 30 pounds of hair would be impossible to hide otherwise, even without the eight stupid croquet balls attached to it. The guise only lasts for a little while until she finds that she’s to girly to take being thrown about and shoved in the mud. Awesome! If only she could be trampled to a bloody pulp it would be perfect.

Everything else is just the teacher enduring horrible punishments from Dyke and Whore.
Oh boy, I really want to start a serious relationship with a 3rd grader that shoves me in the pool and ties me to a railing.

Where exactly do you buy lingerie for children?

Whore’s home life kind of sucks. Her Father left after a divorce and her mother died of cancer. The person that takes care of her is her… cousin? No, it was her mom’s cousin. So what the hell does that make them? Anyway, he was there for some reason and her mom was raising both of them. Or maybe he just lived with them. They really didn’t explain this shit well enough. But the point I want to make is that the cousins were screwing behind Whore’s back. Her mom’s dying wish was that he ‘protect’ her. He brings this wish to fruition like he was a robot with a single prime directive, letting everything else fall by the wayside. He’s very overprotective but for some reason it only becomes apparent in the last two episodes. You also find out that they sleep in the same bed.

They never give any evidence of molestation. Not that it matters anyway. We’re all just victims of society and shitty parenting so it vindicates us of perpetuating the terrible behavior, right?

The ending was predictable; the classic NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS ending. Really, what did you expect? Teacher and student running away to live on an island together? At least one thing was realistic.

Don't stand so close to me.

Strike Witches

This just in; anime getting worse…

When I first saw promotional pictures for this show on the internet I thought they were just original pieces by some crackhead with way too much time on their hands. I didn’t think there was any way a concept with anything like this in it could be given the green light for production. How naïve I was… I’ve seen some retarded shit in my day but Strike Witches redefines the term. There is no word that even comes close to describing how ridiculous it is.

The year is 1944; instead of committing wartime atrocities in China and the Philipines, Japan is a key player in the employment of a new technology that allows magical loli catgirls to fly through the sky while discharging rocket launchers and machine guns. (Sounds like a reasonable premise to me.) A handful of girls from various countries you’ve never heard of are apparantly the only thing defending the planet from a mysterious enemy called Neuroi. (They’re like the gnosis from xenosaga but more like the angels from Evangelion.) The machines that the girls use to fly are called strikers. They’re basically two torpedoes that encapsulate all of both of your legs making the wearer look almost as lethal and badass as Mr. Rogers when he’s feeding his fish. For reasons unknown these girls can use magic, (hence the term “witches”), which they use to fly and create shields to block enemy fire. Also for reasons unknown, whenever the girls are in magic mode they grow a pair of cat ears and a tail. Now honestly, why does this need to happen? It’s like they just stuck it in randomly. Why do they have two pairs of ears? Can they hear better? Is that important? Do the cat ears even work at all? What’s the point? I’m aware that some people find this shit highly erotic but to tell you the truth, I fucking hate anime catgirls. They’re not cute or sexy, they’re just annoying and stupid. And in this case, totally unnecessary. Actually not all of them have cat attributes. A couple are dogs I think and there’s also a bunny. But that still doesn’t make it any less stupid. Now that I think about it this show is like what you get when you put a dozen random anime genres through a meat grinder.

The whole idea of training frail little girls in aerial combat is moronic. Wouldn’t that be the worst possible candidate ever? If the job requires you to one-hand a giant .50 cal while rocketing through the sky to kill aliens in mid air dogfights while half naked, would they be mentally OK with that? *I* wouldn’t be. I’m sure it would be an utterly terrifying prospect to any sane person. In reality who would they find that was suicidal enough to do something that stupid. And then there’re the other problems that they don’t address like wind chill, chapped skin, thin air, and red outs. Fighter pilots in exposed cockpits wear flight jackets, scarves, hats, and goggles. You think maybe that means that wind is a hazard? Maybe they need to be wearing something other than a fucking two-piece swimsuit. Actually there is one episode where two of the girls fly a biplane and dress up in aviator gear. So what they’re saying is that the only time you need to wear wind protection is when you’re partially protected by an airplane but *not* when you‘re completely exposed to the wind.

Anatomically speaking, no one would even be able to put on a pair of strikers because you wouldn’t be able to get your feet past the entrance. If you actually watch them put them on, the tops of their feet are parallel to their shins. In other words, their ankles are bent so that their toes are pointing strait down while they stand strait up. Never mind that it’s impossible, imagine holding it like that for the entirety of your flight. And why don't they wear parachutes or something? If they get shot down at low altitude over water they're probably fine but what If they're fighting over land or even high over water? Well they're fucked aren't they. Not that I care or anything. I really wouldn't mind if they all died. While watching the show there was always the tiniest vestige of hope that someone would die. They are in a war after all. But no they have to have everyone live happily ever after ‘n’ shit. How annoying. There was death in South Pacific and that was a musical. That's as idealistic as it gets. A girl died in Gunslinger Girl, a similar anime, a much better anime too. I kind of feel dirty just for comparing them. Although in a duel I think the strike witches would win since they have infinite ammo and never have to reload thanks to the creators spending little or no time on details not involving a closeup of an ass.

Aside from being able to make a magic shield, there’s no reason why they should be doing this. Why do they even use strikers at all? Why don't they just use airplanes? Or better yet, broomsticks? And let me just say that for a show supposedly based on magic, making shields is about the lamest use for magic I’ve ever seen.

One of the more disturbing problems with the show is the lack of pants. I mean put on some pants you fucking hippies. How am I to believe this is a professional naval facility if there is absolutely no kind of uniform or even pants. Everyone just runs around in bikinis usually with a random naval jacket thrown on. Imagine watching Tora Tora Tora with Admiral Yamamoto giving orders in a thong. This, coupled with the random animal ear thing makes it impossible to take any of the show’s “drama” seriously. I've heard it argued that pants would interfere with the strikers and that it would waste precious time to take off your pants in the middle of an air raid. If this was true, other non-witch females would wear pants or something normal but they don't. And you don't see fire fighters hanging out at the fire station in fire jackets, fire pants, helmets, and oxygen masks and they're under similar time constraints. And that's actually a lot of stuff to put on. All the strike witches have to do is jump in some dumb-looking propeller legs and away they go. And on a side note, ignoring the fact that the bikini hasn’t been invented yet, any woman wearing one in public in 1944 would probably be arrested for public indecency.

Your average Strike Witches episode usually goes something like this:

Pre-intro teaser making empty promises like plot, character development, and/or action.

Intro, (which has more action in it than all of the actual episodes put together, except maybe the first and last ones.)

Girls interact/Fondling ensues

Sitting at a table

Blatant lesbian overtones

One minute of flying

Bulging vaginas

Upskirts or more fondling

Outro

Next episode preview

The plot and setting are secondary to the fan service. Hell, they’re tertiary. They should have just made a yuri porno and save what could have been a very interesting WWII alternate reality for another anime that wasn’t just dicking around. The show’s actually based off of a manga but you get my point.

In episode seven, (Nice ’N’ Breezy), we see just how crippling going pantsless can be. One girl’s bikini bottoms go missing so she steals someone else’s. Then that girl has to steal some from someone else and so on until everyone is scrambling around to reclaim what’s theirs, always with someone left half nude. Apparently everyone owns only one pair of bottoms/panties or is too much of a dumbass to go to their room and get another pair. Or maybe logic is just irrelevant when trying to meet your arbitrary crotch and ass shot quota per episode. If there’s a perfectly reasonable excuse for occasional fanservice then fine but don’t just cram it down my throat. And it couldn’t hurt to make some of them look a little older. You can’t go five minutes without seeing some eleven-year-old’s camel-toe. I know pedophilia is all the rage in Japan but lets try to show a modicum of restraint here.

Episode five is entitled “Swift, Gigantic, and Soft.” Obviously they’re talking about breasts. (All except for the swift part. I’m clueless as to how a pair of tits can be swift.) Anyway, in this episode we learn that the main character Yoshika is a flaming lesbian who can’t stop fantasizing about her teammates’ boobs and has an irrepressible urge to molest them in a public setting. You think I’m exaggerating this…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from anime it’s that all females are lesbians if not bisexuals.

In the last episode the witches have been disbanded and basically replaced by a single unmanned flying robot. It does their job better then they could ever imagine and generally makes everyone in the 501st Special Upskirt Division look like a pile of shit. Then they all died in a fire and no one remembered who they were. The end.

End... Get it?