One question I face from time to time as an anime blogger is, what to do with terrible anime? I don’t mean anime that isn’t to my taste, like shonen series with 500+ episodes that span a single battle or shows with fanservice that’s not the least bit clever or inventive, or wonky-but-genius concepts I’m not that into for some reason, like Pop Team Epic. I mean really terrible anime shows like the currently-airing The One I Love Is a Little Sister, but She’s Not My Little Sister.
What Represents Terrible Anime?
Thanks to the “universal standard of good taste,” we all know a terrible anime series when we see it, though of course, we can never agree which shows are really terrible. As a general rule, I never say anything negative about an anime series on social media because I know it will be someone’s favorite thing ever, and they’ll get mad at me. I asked J-List’s Twitter followers what the worst shows were, and got some interesting replies, including:
- King’s Game. A class of students must follow strange commands, including bizarre sexual ones, they receive on their smartphones or they’ll die.
- In Another World With My Smartphone, a guy accidentally dies, so God sets him up with a new life in another world where he has unlimited powers. I’m seeing a trend in smartphone-related terrible anime concepts here.
- Lost Village/Mayoiga. It actually had an innovative concept: a group of men and women sign up for a “new life” in a deserted village, but when they get there…the plot falls off a cliff.
- The currently airing Conception seems to be another terrible anime. It starts out with a mystery of a girl who’s gotten pregnant even though she’s a virgin. Next thing we know, she and the main character are swept off to an isekai, and things go downhill fast.
- Sometimes first impressions can be misleading, of course. I originally disliked Kill Me Baby!, an anime about J-List’s mascot Megumi going to high school with a trained assassin. I disliked the show at first until I gave it a second viewing and recognized the genius of the jokes. So your mileage may vary.
Another Terrible Anime: My Sister, My writer
We’ve got another terrible anime this season is Ore ga Suki na no wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja nai, aka The One I Love Is a Little Sister, but She’s Not My Little Sister, aka ImoImo, aka My Sister, My Writer. Despite my policy of never saying anything bad about an anime, I felt I had to make an exception here.
In short, it’s about a younger sister who writes a light novel about a younger sister who’s in love with her brother, because she’s in love with her brother and wants him to notice her romantically. But she’s shy about publishing the novel under her own name, so she asks him to submit the work. A bunch of other girls emerges to complete the harem. So far the highlight has been when the girl asks her brother what the word panchira (“pantyshot”) means, insisting he tells her, all while the camera gives us panty-shots up her skirt.
When you watch a hentai anime, you know going in that the animation quality will be significantly lower than mainstream shows. If you wear glasses, it’s almost like you’ve taken your glasses off, the quality difference is so noticeable. This is why I nearly always prefer “near-hentai” series like Kiss x Sis or To Love-ru over true hentai, which has higher quality.
One trope I enjoy is when they make a fictional anime inside another anime, which sometimes gets animated, like Kujibiki Unbalance, a show that was embedded inside the Genshiken universe, or Exodus! and Third Girls Aerial Squad, two anime series that are produced by the characters in Shirobako, and we actually get to see the anime they produced in the two OAVs. If this show had been something like this, a spin-off that was mentioned inside another show, it might have been more welcome.
What shows represent terrible anime to you? Will you be watching the ImoImo anime? Tell us on Twitter!
Though there might be some terrible anime out there, one thinks we can all agree on is that the anime figures coming out of Japan’s top figure studios are amazing, and we would love them on our desks. See the newest figures we posted to the site, and preorder them now!
