Being
thrown into the deep end sometimes works brilliantly, though – I had that same
impression when I started to watch Azumanga Daioh, after all – and
looking back, the set-up isn’t so complicated. It’s essentially like MahouSensei Negima (young magic-using boy gathers a harem of moé clichés and
they compete for his attention while magical crises are averted) with a touch
of Baka to Test, plus the anarchic humour, style changes and direct
parodies of Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei and heaps of fanservice. Still,
after a few episodes I was thinking there just wasn’t much to Wasshoi! –
I’d seen it all before. I didn’t like the intro song – an attempt at the
rapid-fire style of Damekko Doubutsu or Lucky Star with a festival dance feel that just
meanders and sounds half-finished – and it felt like Tanarotte was
painfully underdeveloped for a central character, like she was just Mikoto from
the first episodes of Mai-HiME, never to develop beyond that.
Episode
five changed everything with the introduction of Hapsiel, the masochistic,
bisexual beefcake of an angel with a mission to spread love and peace by
kissing everyone into submission – which was one of the most disturbingly
hilarious episodes of an anime I’ve ever seen. He is so completely foul and the
humour so gross that it’s brilliant – not even mentioning the Evangelion parody
it builds from. There’s something homophobic about the humour of Hapsiel, how
repulsive it is to have a big, muscled man acting so suggestively, but main
character Takuto is just about as sexualised as the girls in his harem, and as
the moé-loving teacher points out, he and his kind have no problems with cute
love stories between younger boys (and the tragic one-sided love story of two
minor male characters is more affectionate mocking than contemptuous), but
Hapsiel’s sweaty, forceful, ultra-masculine love has long been a source of
gross-out humour in Japan (Chou Aniki being a well-known example), with Hapsiel probably its brilliantly horrific apogee.
Moé
sensibilities turn out to dominate the whole series, and it soon becomes the
wider cast who steal the show – one brilliant episode plays straight the love
story between a personified computer and a rocket about to be sent to space.
The older male characters tend to be very into their moé and it’s very obvious
that the otaku crowd is being pandered to, teased and complimented – which makes
for some feel-good viewing and big laughs. Of course, the series tries to end
on a serious note, with tragedy coming very close and the ending being
uplifting, with a final Christmas episode doing such a good job of making the
central three girls endearing that it really should have been episode 4 or 5,
because their being underdeveloped and not actually very interesting was
probably the show’s biggest problem.
It
was also remarkable in being one of two shows from late 2008 that were
purposefully highly censored to boost DVD sales – the other being Rosario+VampireCapu2, which went too far in every way and ended up with a ruined TV show
and a vastly overdone DVD. Here, all the risqué scenes and nude scenes were
replaced with clay figures. This showed a lot more effort and ingenuity than Rosario+Vampire
managed, and other than shots of faces, I have to say that I rather preferred
the clay versions, not because they looked good but because the uncensored
version was just really awkward to watch. Tanarotte looks like a preteen but
with oddly large boobs, and seeing them bare just…seems incongruous and isn’t
at all a pleasant sight. It just looks tacked on and doesn’t suit her as a loli
type. Macademi Wasshoi! is a fun, zany comedy with lots of explosions
and random Kaiji parodies – it shouldn’t need nipples to shift DVDs, and
feels cheapened by them. But perhaps that is just where I’m out-of-sync with
the moé ideal…
