#oslb

anime staff turn on your location. animate these skits

anime staff look

this question is like a loaded gun being pointed right at my face (lol)

so osomatsu-kun is an old gag manga series from like the 60s that got adapted into an anime in the 60s and 80s. it’s about sextuplets getting into shenanigans and several other reoccurring characters like the girl next door, a conman, a scrappy orphan, etc. and since it was pretty old and pretty popular there’s a fair amount of references to it nowadays (e.g. one of susie deltarune’s startled sprites is a reference to iyami’s signature pose). I haven’t read or watched a lot of it but from what I’ve seen it can be charming and goofy. I’m pretty sure someone gets held at knifepoint for some reason.

osomatsu-san is a 2015 gag anime that ages the characters up to early 20s and turns them into useless horny neets. while the original had the brothers as more of a unit, the new anime gave them very distinct personalities. the manga has extra stories based on the anime. it was really, really, REALLY popular like 5 years ago. each episode might have one (or more) of 3 types of skits:

mundane character skits (e.g. karamatsu monologues about everybody’s mahjong strategy! everybody picks out hypothetical pizza orders and relentlessly dunks on each other! osomatsu thinks one of the brothers stole his wallet!) (unironically these are some of my favorite skits)

slightly-to-extremely unhinged character skits (e.g. ichimatsu’s cat can read minds! jyuushimatsu starts thinking about existential stuff which starts breaking down the entire world into its semantic essentials! todomatsu is fired from the show and replaced by an american actor!)

completely unrelated skits that (usually) uses the existing characters as templates with varying degrees of characterization carrying over (e.g. jyuushimatsu is being interviewed by choromatsu for a job! karamatsu (who isn’t karamatsu) and a genderbent todomatsu (who isn’t todomatsu) go to an inn and meet a small girl who’s the guardian spirit of the room, osomatsu (not osomatsu)! an adaptation of a charlie chaplin skit!)

as for whether or not I’d rec it……….. n-no. that doesn’t mean it’s not good at all, or you won’t like it, but 1) I don’t really like rec’ing things with vulgar humor because it’s a huge hit-or-miss range, and 2) since it’s an irreverent gag anime with the premise of Ha Ha Useless Stupid Virgins there can be a bunch of different caveats episode-by-episode. it’s not EVERY skit but stuff like fatphobia or transmisogyny or suicide does come up as a punchline more than once and one of the genderbend designs for jyuushimatsu is supposed to be an extreme gyaru look but it comes across very blackface.

the way osomatsu hooks you in is that, with all the personalities of the brothers, if you’re someone that gets invested in a certain character archetype, or a certain sibling dynamic, there are a lot of very good character skits that show it off. if you look for it, there’s also some surprisingly good character consistency/development across some skits, e.g. during s1 karamatsu is mostly a doormat, during s2 there’s a skit where choromatsu tells him to knock it off and be more honest, during s3 there’s an episode where the brothers are asking what pizza he’d want and he’s like ‘haha! anything you guys choose would be fine by me!’ and when they push him for more he goes ‘fine if you want the truth I think this topic is fucking stupid I just wanted to end the conversation’. like they don’t change enough to disrupt the status quo, but there is attention to detail that shows the writers are genuinely aware of their own characters. I’ve also heard that the writers actually targeted a female demographic, and I can kind of see it in terms of… while it’s a horny gag anime with dudes as the main characters, it’s never felt as Gross To Watch As A Gal as some other stuff. I think it’s because it’s horny but not sexy. nothing about this anime is sexy.

actually hang on I recently sent a post to a friend that describes the vibe of the anime, here’s a reaction to the s1 finale (but I don’t think s2 or s3 ever reaches the level s1 did) (It Was A Lot)

@demonlikejudgeoffire from the impression I get oso-kun might be like, similarly unhinged but in terms of showa standards and also not horny bc it’s more geared towards kids? showa era stuff is… hm… it really is… it’s kinda… well… y’know? it just has that showa-ness to it. cheesy and incomprehensible but in a charming way if that’s your style, from my experience... I’ve definitely seen weird screencaps, but I’ve never actually watched it.