OreImo
manages, just by the skin of its teeth, to be more than the sum of its
parts.
Because,
honestly, it really shouldn’t be very good. It’s actually in the same line of
succession as Rosario + Vampire and B-gata H-Kei, the latter of
which has a character with a notable amount of similarities to Kirino, the girl at the centre of this anime. But while each of those I expected to be dreadful, only to find
myself entertained and liking them whilst knowing that, actually, they were
pretty crap, this one I expected to be mediocre, and found that it was mediocre…yet
really, really enjoyed it.
At
a basic level, this is harem anime with all the usual harem contrivances and
awkward need to have the male protagonist not actually commit to any of the
girls pursuing him, as that’s when the tension goes out of the story. There’s a
veneer of cleverness overlaid in that eroge (the story-based erotic
games that form the basis for many harem anime) are the subject of the plot, as
referenced in things like choices for key decisions popping up on the screen
and the alternate ending given in the OVAs being referred to as the ‘true
route’, but that if anything counts against the show: at times it comes close
to the smug ‘we’re above these clichés but we’ll use them anyway just to point
out how silly they are and because we can’t actually think of anything else’
writing I dislike in shows like Buffy (see my Cabin in the Woods rant).
But it’s the self-examining otaku-centric writing that also gives this
title its charm.
Kirino
is quite the perfect teenaged girl – she excels in academia and sports, has
plenty of friends and is pretty enough to be a model. But her big brother Kyousuke
knows her as the stroppy, arrogant girl who snubs him and constantly criticises
him at home – until one day he discovers her secret. She likes anime and hentai games. A lot. And not the ones you might expect, but the ones known as the
domain of the creepiest otaku – she likes moé-moé anime about little sister types,
especially ones who get romantically involved with their big brothers. But not
because she projects herself onto the little girl – no, no, she wants to be the
big brother in the situation. Kirino is a pretty, clever, sporty, fashionable
lolicon.
Upon
discovering this, Kyousuke realises how lonely she has been and does his best
to help her. He arranges for her to meet up with some other female otaku, and
despite some difficulties she makes two entertaining friends – the hilarious
clumsy, awkward old-fashioned otaku Saori, who gives her name as Saori Bajeena
(both an absurd, funny-sounding name and a Gundam reference) and is
secretly a refined ojou-sama type, and the acid-tongued, standoffish
Kuroneko (a nickname meaning ‘black cat’) who is a loli in the other Japanese
pop culture sense, ie a follower of Lolita fashion. She’s also a bit of a loli
in the former sense – ie, looks like a little girl and is sexually appealing –
though keeps everyone at arm’s length. So Kirino and Kuroneko are both tsundere
in different ways: Kirino’s tsun side is all aggression, contempt
and shouting, while her dere side is blushes and sharing, while Kuroneko
is tsun with haughtiness and cruelty, then dere with softness,
goofiness and…well, more blushes. And both soon show an interest in Kyousuke
while trying to hide it from him, as do just about every other girl he comes in
contact with – his spacey childhood friend, Kirino’s two model friends (a brat
and a normal but very pretty girl who presses close to yandere) and
even comic relief Saori.
Where
the series succeeds is the otaku comedy. It’s nothing very new – most of it has
been seen in Genshiken and Welcome to the NHK, even Otaku noVideo – but it’s very well-balanced over just a few episodes. Be it the
reactions of disgust of the uninitiated seeing nudey transformation scenes a la
Nanoha or Kuroneko revealing herself to be gaming goddess by easily
beating a pro gamer (like I did today, kekeke…), be it pastiches of the kind of
anime Kuroneko likes – the mesh of Code Geass and DNAngel that is
Masquera (with a superb outro song made for it) or the obviously-named Rosen Jungfrau – or subtle inclusions of other incest-based anime like the DVDs
of Da Capo on Kirino’s pile. More than most ecchi romances, it manages
to actually be funny.
But it stumbles in its second half. A big part of this is the anime-only
story that Kirino’s terrible fanfiction (which includes the emoticons she uses
in online and phone chats) becomes published as a novel and enough of a smash
hit that there was an anime adaptation, which leads to some scenes where Kyousuke
is given the chance to stand up for his sister and look cool. The trouble is,
it all seems like some wish-fulfilment fantasy that someone is going to wake
from, or some bizarre Haruhi-like bit of supernatural reality-bending.
It seems really jarring that Kirino could make this story, and inconsistent in
the way it’s presented as simultaneously hilariously amateur and wildly
popular. It all happens too quickly and with too little input from Kirino, and is all over and near-forgotten too
soon – quite surprising given that they got premier anime writer Kurata
Hideyuki (Uchuu Show-e Youkuso, Read or Die) for the script. It all
basically felt tacked on so AIC could pat themselves on the back about
fan-pleasing things like changing their intro every episode. And then soon
after, it becomes apparent that her attitude isn’t changing. There’s a sweet
ironic moment where Kirino finds a little sister character annoying because
she’s too prickly and doesn’t show her cute side until much later (when Kirino
of course does a U-turn), which she doesn’t see is a direct mirror of her own
behaviour. But the trouble is that she’s just hard to like, it’s hard to
swallow that her brother really doesn’t understand her actual feelings (which
honestly seem unlikely for me for someone who likes little girls), and while I do
like her, and enjoy watching her, she’s just not all that likeable and her
character progression feels much too slow.
This
is if anything highlighted by the OVAs, in which (following the original light
novels’ plot) she leaves the country and Kuroneko goes to Kyousuke’s school.
The two of them join the video games club and it all gets far more Genshiken
as she clashes with a fujoshi and then the two of them work together
on a game. The mini-arc is just far more enjoyable than the main anime, and
Kuroneko is a rather more interesting central character, especially in a modern
school setting rather than, say, as a loli detective in the 20s, Gosick-style.
The fujoshi character is hilarious, and the Makabe-kun character I found
utterly adorable, especially blushing wildly as he hears the horrible things Akagi
the fujoshi has imagined him doing. I wonder what that hint about her
brother despising him in the DVD extras was…
Indeed,
the DVD extras deserve a mention – I thought ‘animated commentary’ would just
be a waste of time, and the horrible basic animation of the SD chibis in the
first episode almost bore that out, but ultimately it was less a dull
commentary than a very interesting way to get characters discussing the anime
from outside it – as well as having some really fun ideas like letting the
characters from the anime-within-the-anime do some commentary and having the
characters see things that happened in private. AIC Build at the very
least know how to please fans with the trimmings.
My
head says that I shouldn’t really like OreImo. Under all the
self-referential humour, it’s still dumb harem, and its main character may be
sweet but even with just twelve episodes it stretched credulity a little that
she could be so blatant and yet Kyousuke remain oblivious. And yet I looked
forward to every episode, I laughed at the jokes and the awkward situations,
and though I preferred Kuroneko I was pleased when Kirino returned to the series.
And I will definitely tune in for season 2.
