#reverse harems

Series: Meiji Tokyo Renka Platform: Crunchyroll

So after like two months of finals and being busy with cons I’m back on my bullshit! The second episode picks up right where the first ended and I am reliving the horror all over again. I forgot how much I hate Ougi’s voice! 

So as it turns out Mei is only good at staring dopily up at people while everyone else just stands around watching a famous field medic fondle the girl out of time. 

Then Mei wakes up. That’s just her MO now, something dramatic happens, we don’t see the fallout and Mei wakes up. Problem solved. The only bright side is she appears to be just as confused by what happened as I am. Then I shit you not we are shown a flashback to the exact same scene we saw not even a full minute ago! 

The blue subtitles means it’s a flashback, and also that I am still screaming.

Mei is shocked and aghast and realizes Mori Ougai is, in fact, a famous historical figure like twelve years after I did and I know literally nothing about the history of Japan. The flashback keeps chugging on but at least this time it’s things I’m not seeing for literally the third time. Best boy Koizumi continues to prove he’s the best character in the whole anime and I wish it just followed him.

Look at his glorious Heterochromia!

Koizumi waxes poetic about Mei’s outfit and he and Ougai say the word skirt in tandem and I can sense Roy Mustang flinching somewhere across the multiverse. Then without saying anything Ougai literally drags Mei away. The flashbacks speed up from there and we learn Mei is in one of the many available rooms at Ougai’s mansion. 

Cut to present. 

Mei says aloud it wasn’t a dream and I keep wishing it was. Then all the boys are shown on screen again just to remind you this is a reverse Harem and Mei reminds everyone what the plot is again.  There’s a boom that I honestly thought was someone in a room over crashing but apparently was supposed to be a mid-day cannon, I am 90% certain the sound designer has never heard a cannon before because they don’t sound like that! 

Anyways Mei panics and interrupts Syunso painting and he’s pretty obviously pissed. 

The last known photo of Mei before she mysteriously disappeared. Mei notices all the paintings in Syunso’s room and then crawls over to this one.

Gee what gave you that idea, it couldn’t be the giant white spot where something is clearly missing could it? Ougai returns and I continue to hate his pet name for her. Especially since this is his reasoning.

Nope, gross gross gross.  Mei decides it’s best not to tell anyone she’s the girl that jumped through time and the guys decide to let her live there and Ougai is a creep. He brings up the Fiancee thing again and Mei’s heart goes doki doki again, like a traitor. But then it turns out she’s hungry and suggests a beef bowl and I learn that the value of the yen never used to be so low.  Mei watches Ougai’s maid clean the hall. I swear this is important! (How many more times will I say that?)  Mei changes out of her scandalous clothes and stares dumbly out the side of a rickshaw. I swear this girl has two facial settings: “I am starting to fall asleep but am trying to focus on you” and “You make my Kokoro not wanna be Brokoko” Anyways they get Sukiyaki despite the boys saying it was expensive like a minute ago. Mei’s obsession with beef continues and I am certain at this point the writers think funny quirks are how you write a personality. We are ten minutes in and I am so bored.  Ougai’s like “This reminds me of when we first met.” And I doubt that! Then another flashback and THAT’S NOT HOW PENS WORK!

What inflatable pen nib is this?  Ougai magically writes something with his rubber pen but they never show it to us and instead we’re treated to Ougai just getting out of a bath. He’s totally naked as he crouches over to wash his arm. Then he hears Syunso, and literally gets up to walk totally naked over to the door and throws it open. Syunso is being weird sexual about this cat he’s about to draw when he notices his stalker. 

And apparently, Mei being super into beef reminds him of Syunso’s concerning obsession with cats. Syunso is also a kidnapping victim it seems, forced to stay in Ougai’s mansion because Ougai thinks he’ll be famous one day.  Then because Mei says she likes cats Ougai’s like “Help us find Syunso’s cat.” That’s it, that’s all the qualification she needed and nothing else. Well, not totally they bring up the word Tamayori, something I neglected to mention in the last write up. It’s a name that means Mei can see spirits. Ougai tells this back story but honestly, it’s not important.  Mei mentions that the black cat is what’s missing from Syunso’s painting, meaning the cat literally ran away from the painting... which... is not what a spirit is but sure! There are so many flashbacks to the previous night it’s actually annoying!  The spirit that says Mei’s name is back again and he’s just as unhelpful as ever. Then back at the manor Syunso is an asshole for no reason because that’s just what every man in this anime are like. 

Be still my beating heart. Mei doesn’t seem all that upset though and instead hallucinates grave digger hair and like a glutton for punishment seeks him out. He’s just standing in a field and then demands he send her back but we can’t have her not having a romance with an asshole dude from a different time period can we? 

Considering he seems able to slip back and forth between time on top of sending a whole other person to a different era I’m calling bullshit!  So gravedigger says it needs to be a full moon before he can send her back and uh- it’s a full moon right now bucko! Anyways were given the deadline of a month for Mei to fall so totally in love with someone she chooses to abandon her family for a man who doesn’t think she deserves the same rights as him. Mei decides to help out using her spirit powers and goes back to the manor.  Mei stops Syunso from cannibalizing his own painting and says she’ll find the cat for him. Then Mei invents mops, I shit you not she got so sad looking at the maid bend her back to clean she invents mops. 

Definitely not fucking up the timeline at all! The ED is so boring, it’s literally just a clip show of the episode we just watched.  The only good thing about this episode is the promo for the next episode:

Yes, I am fully aware that the appeal of these kinds of anime for most people isn’t the heroine, or the plot at all, but of course that sweet sweet manservice™. Just hear me out. The “point” of these dull ass characters, as I understand it, is to make their personalities as vague as possible so that any girl could theoretically empathize and identify with them. On paper, this is a sound marketing strategy, because if the viewers can’t relate to the main character of the anime, or comic, or book, what have you, that they’re reading/watching, they’ll stop reading/watching. But as with communism, this strategy is good on paper, bad in practice. By making a character so vague that she literally has no identity of her own, she ends up detaching the viewer. You can’t relate to a blank canvas. It just doesn’t work.

To demonstrate my point, take a show like Ouran High School Host Club. By all accounts, Host Club is a reverse harem show. It has a female heroine who somehow finds herself surrounded by impossibly gorgeous men, each of whom fit into an “archetype”, and most of whom develop a thing for her by the series conclusion. By all means it should have the same, boring protagonist as all of these other harems, but it doesn’t. Why? Because the main heroine isn’t like all of those other girls (wow, I’m really bad at jokes).

It’s literally the same shot! But you can see just how more expressive Host Club’s “heroine” is. Haruhi actually has a personality. She’s a teenage girl with a lot of snark, mostly due to putting up with her fellow hosts’ shit, but a good heart, and a flexible gender to boot. She talks and acts like an actual person, and bounces off each of her love interests in a different, interesting way. It also doesn’t hurt that her interactions with the other hosts don’t happen in a vacuum, they interact with each other just as much as her, which gives the cast a more “ensemble” feel than a strict harem. I could write a whole essay on just what makes Host Club so ingenious, but I digress.

There is another difference between anime like Code: Realize and Diabolik Lovers, and Host Club that I haven’t touched on yet: their origins. Allow me to explain. The former type of anime are all adapted from Otome games, while Host Club was adapted from a manga. For the uninformed, Otome games are visual novels attempting to appeal directly to either male or female viewers. Essentially, they’re romance simulators. In these games, the focus really isn’t on the heroine, because--depending on the game--you might never see her; she’s an extension of the player. She doesn’t need a personality, because the player automatically substitutes their own. That’s how video games work, and why they’re so difficult to adapt to film. Unlike books or manga, in order to properly adapt a video game to screen, you need to give the MC a “canon” personality. And this is where anime adaptions of Otome games tend to fail, they forget to add a personality to their heroines.

Or perhaps maybe they don’t forget, maybe the dormouse personality is added on purpose. In some anime, like Diabolik Lovers, it could even make sense.

How else is the main heroine going to let these crazed vampires keep biting her week after week if she’s confident enough to tell them to stop? Counter point: there are many ways that you could make her into a more interesting heroine without sacrificing the sexy times. Perhaps the vampires are hanging something over the heroine’s head, and if she doesn’t offer up her blood to them, they’ll kill someone she loves, or the like. Perhaps the vampires inject a drug into the blood stream when they bite, addicting the victim so that they experience withdrawal if they stop biting her. Perhaps she’s just as perverted as they are and just plain likes it. These are all things that could be used to preserve the harem without sacrificing the heroine’s personality in the process, and these are just solutions I thought of off the top of my head.

The problem is that these solutions take time to implement, and may anger already existing fans of the Otome. Except for the last one, which would just be plain unacceptable for a teenage girl to be horny, god forbid. So the adapters instead opt for the least time consuming and easy answer: make her a fucking idiot. There, problem solved! Then, because of anime like this, it becomes the norm to have dormouse protagonists, and then anime like Code: Realize just jump on the bandwagon!

Of course, this isn’t just a reverse harem problem either. It exists just as prevalently in regular harems as well. I present to you the Light Novel Guy:

They literally all look exactly the same! This may be even more of a problem than the dormouse heroine because of one fact: while the dormouse heroine evolved due to adaptation, the light novel guy was designed that way. He’s called light novel guy because that’s where he originates from: light novels. The authors of these characters wrote these characters to appeal to teenage boys. They’re overpowered as all hell (a hero, if you will), they get all of the girls, and... and that’s about it. Personality is entirely optional. You can theoretically get away with this in a novel, because you have the light novel guy’s narration to keep things at least a little interesting, but in an anime, you don’t have that. Unless you add in some super cheesy voice overs (which you can’t get away with you’re a sarcastic ass and your name rhymes with nyan), you have nothing to add personality.

This sucks. This sucks. I’ve always believed that character interaction lies at the heart of every narrative. It’s what I build all of my stories off of. And contrary to what light novel authors and anime producers think, you can’t have good character interaction if your main character is boring as fuck. While I was watching Code: Realize this morning, I kept thinking to myself: this is good. I like this, but why is the heroine even here? If she wasn’t what got the plot going, the show would have functioned just as well without her, maybe even better. And that is not what you want. You don’t want your main character to be the one that the audience groans about every time they come on screen, or worse, skips ahead to later in the episode where the other characters interact, because they know that they’ll miss absolutely nothing by skipping this conversation.

And you know what’s the most damning of all? I don’t even remember her name. I remember the names of all of the other characters. There was the gentleman character Lupin, and then there was my favorite devilish smile character Impey, and there was baby-face Frankenstein. Hell, I even remember the name of her father, Isaak, who we didn’t even see. But I don’t even remember if they gave us her... oh, I just got it. It’s Cardia. That’s right. I remember it now. They said it like five times. And I still didn’t remember it until now. That’s terrible. I think I have to turn in my Feminist card.