…but I will anyway. Because the new season’s started, it’s the first show I’ve seen in English to download, and I liked it more than I thought I would! At least so far, and given its genre combination (harem/dating sim + mahou shoujo). They found a way to combine both male AND female fantasies together!
The harem aspects lead off, and I’ve gotten to the point where unless it’s done creatively (see Hayate no Gotoku) they’re usually a turn off. We’ve got the moe-because-she’s-clumsy-promised-girl, Sumomo, meeting the male protagonist Tsuwabuki-kun by–what else?–bumping into him and spilling water on him. She has the impossibly squeaky voice of all moe leads, and look! Huge limpid fountains of tears in her eyes! Irresistable, right? Don’t you just want to pet her?
Almost immediately thereafter, another character archetype appears, Nako. She’s presumably the tsundere, belligerent-at-first-until-she-discovers-she-has-deep-seated-feelings-she-wants-to-deny-but-can’t-oh-I’m-so-conflicted! We even have the matchmaking teacher, who drafts unsocial Tsuwabuki into the gardening club (might he be feeling a bit emasculated at this point?) as a fairly obvious ploy to get him to talk to Sumomo and Nako.
It’s here that the magical girl elements appear and things finally start getting interesting. When Tsuwabuki, through a strange series of events, gets turned into a stuffed lamb of all things (at least he’s a ram or else the fact of being voiced by Mai Goto would have been too much for his now-struggling masculinity)–suddenly, the long-held fantasy of many guys to be that pretty girl’s pet, stuffed animal, baby, or whatever else that gets cuddled and fondled on her chest comes true. And Sumomo, who is clearly not made of the same stuff as the other pink-haired lead of Sumomomomomo…, gets to live out her secret desire to be a Card Captor Stardrop Retriever. Complete with a magical wand whose magic words sound just like the lyrics to my cell phone ringtone:
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I have to admit I laughed harder than I expected to. The opening shots of the anime honestly made it seem like a satire, and while my hopes were disappointed on that score, I guess I was relieved that it wasn’t another generic harem comedy. Instead, it’s a generic harem and magical girl show! Yuki-chan/Tsuwabuki has a legacy to live up to, though: the smartmouth Keroro from Cardcaptor Sakura and Kon from Bleach, and he’d better be just as funny or else I just might lose interest. There’s only so much squeeky I can handle!
Hate to be the bear of bad news but Tsuwabuki is too busy falling in love with Sumomo to be a smartass liek Kerochan 😉