Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
“maid is a state of mind and it’s about being a woman and shooting people.”
-memetic tumblr post by user lezzyharpy
Friends, rejoice. It’s finally happened, after who knows how many decades, the pop culture icon of the anime maid has finally completed her transformation, from her origins as a specific kind of live-in cleaning staff to a roving band of hyper-violent killers in funny outfits. The metamorphosis is complete; the postmodern otaku eschaton is upon us.
Akiba Maid War, a show that promises a whole hell of a lot by having that title, makes me regret I already pulled out the “Birdie Wing and Estab-Life” comparison earlier this week with Shinobi no Ittoki. Akiba Maid War isn’t the same kind of ridiculous as those two anime, but it’s definitely part of a minor ongoing trend of anime whose main defining feature is just being sublimely inscrutable. Like Ittoki, though, it’s also a self-conscious throwback. Once upon a time, this sort of deadpan surreal comedy where extreme violence is half the joke was pretty common, but demonstrative examples like Excel Saga, Puni Puni Poemi, or Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan are no longer widely recognized, at least not in the Anglosphere. This just isn’t a genre that has many modern descendants, with perhaps the only other recent example I can think of being Dropkick on My Devil.
But enough of comparisons to other anime. Even if you’d never seen a single other, you’d immediately clock Maid War as something supremely strange just by its opening minutes, where a rain-drenched Akihabara c. 1985 erupts in a, to us, currently unexplained shooting. A cafe maid is shot dead in the downpour, and her companion silently swears vengeance upon her assassins. Cut to opening credits.
When we return, it’s nearly 15 years later. 1999, the final year of the 20th century. Our protagonist is the chipper Nagomi Wahira (Reina Kondou), who is looking forward to her new job at a pig-themed(…??) maid cafe. A job that even provides free room and board.
Her enthusiasm remains through her extremely rough first shift, in which Nagomi firmly slots herself into the classic dojikko archetype, but quickly withers when a guy shows up trying to demand what sure sounds an awful lot like protection money from Nagomi’s boss (Ayahi Takagaki. The character herself has no name, she’s just “Tenchou.”).
From here, things rapidly escalate. Nagomi is sent on a nondescript “errand” that consists of handing a letter to the manager of a rival maid cafe. Ranko (Rina Satou), another one of the maids, who is a 35 year old woman and, I’m pretty sure, the same woman from the opening scene, insists on accompanying her. We then find out that Maid War is, essentially, what would happen if someone watched Black Lagoon and got angry that Roberta wasn’t every character.
The letter contains a bunch of yakuza-esque insults, including calling the other cafe’s girls (who wear rabbit ears) “cockroaches with antennae.” This goes over aabout as well as you’d expect, and Ranko ends up taking over as the main force for the episode’s final few minutes, where it turns out she can do some serious gun-fu shit.
But honestly even without the bloodshed, the show’s entire vibe is “off” in a way that’s clearly deliberate but also surprisingly subtle. The color palette and lighting are the biggest tells; far more than the popping pinks and blues that populate the whole “otaku action anime” micro-genre like Akiba’s Trip and Rumble Garanndoll, Maid War‘s visuals are dingy, washed-out, and deliberately rather grimy-looking. Even the scenes that actually take place outside, under the neon lights of Akihabara itself, having a slightly sickly look to them. Fitting for Maid War‘s grotesque take on the whole “moe moe kyun” thing; the central setpiece is Ranko mowing down hordes of angry battle maids, soundtracked to her coworker Yumechi (Minami Tanaka) singing a cutesy song back at the cafe.
We end on Nagomi, traumatized from her exposure to frankly unthinkable amounts of death in a single day, trying to brainstorm a way out, only to discover that Ranko is in fact her roommate, and the very notion of escape is, consequently, totally impossible.
Obviously, all this is a joke, but it is a little hard to know if Maid War will be able to keep up the silliness. A lot of the most memorable shows in this genre are on the short side, and that’s because it’s difficult to keep topping yourself in terms of absurdity. Then again, this is a series where a gratuitous Kurosawa movie-style blood gusher can turn off and on again like a leaky faucet if it needs to for the sake of a gag. Maybe Maid War will be just fine.
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