Tag: Kawaii dake ja Nai Shikimori-san

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Intro & Part 1

“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.

Here we are again, anime fans. Every year, it’s seemed more and more surreal that I actually made it to the end of the year and kept up anime blogging. For sure, I’ve had my ups and downs this year—honestly probably more of the latter, for the first time since I began writing here on MPA—but I’ve kept at it, and y’all have stuck with me. I truly, deeply, from the bottom of my heart, appreciate that. You guys mean the world to me.

In past years, I’ve often let this introductory portion of the list run a little long. Instead, this year I’m just gonna run down the basics for you. This list, released in parts over the next couple days, will be of every anime from this year that I, personally, actually completed, ranked from worst to best. (That’s a little over 30 of them, if you were wondering. Not that much in the grand scheme of things!) The criteria for inclusion is a bit fuzzy, but for the most part, to get on this list, I have to have seen the series, and it has to be a TV anime. But, I allow myself some wiggle room, so you’ll see one or two things that were OVAs or ONAs and one that hasn’t actually finished airing yet! Two notable exclusions I want to bring up are Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury and Summertime Render. The former not being here is a simple case of its first cour not yet being finished. The latter is absent because the show is still not legally available in the US, where most of my readers reside, and I’d rather not open that particular can of worms at the moment. (I do highly recommend both, just for reference.) Also; the amount of entries in each part of the list is not going to be consistent. Roughly, it’s probably going to break down into the bottom five (this column right here), a column of shows I thought were “okay” to “pretty solid” (tomorrow’s column), a column of shows I thought were good to great (Saturday’s column), and finally, the top five on Sunday. Some I will have only a paragraph or two to say about, some I will have quite a bit more to say about. Hopefully you’re excited.

Finally, before we jump into the list itself, I do want to make a small plea, here. I don’t usually directly ask for financial assistance in the actual bodies of my articles, but writing the year-end list is extremely labor-intensive compared to essentially any other article on my site. If you can spare the money, and if you think what I do here is worth it, you can support me here on Ko-Fi or here on Patreon. Every little bit helps, and to those of you who have supported me at any point in the past, you again have my deepest gratitude. I really cannot articulate how much that means to me.

Anyway! Enough of the mushy stuff. You guys are reading this part of the column for one reason and one reason only, right? To read about this year’s few true washouts, the worst of the worst. To tell the truth, most anime this year were pretty good! 2022 overall stands as probably my favorite year for anime since 2018, which is a hard fucking bar to clear. Nonetheless, there were a couple real stinkers. Some of these are going to be obvious, a few might be controversial. We’ll save the good and the ugly for another day; let’s meet the bad.

#35. LOVE FLOPS

Where to even start? LOVE FLOPS, the year’s worst anime—at least, the worst I actually saw end to end—is an endlessly self-impressed, completely clueless piece of derivative junk with no greater point, no aesthetic value, and of real importance to absolutely no one. It is horny without being the least bit sensuous, and pompous without the slightest bit of genuine intellectualism. A cobbled-together kludge of tropes from all over Japanese pop culture: other anime, video games, visual novels, and manga. It’s impossible to call Love Flops disappointing; no one had any expectations for it in the first place. But somehow, it still feels like a huge letdown. Perhaps just in that it manages to be the most tedious and annoying harem anime in a year that also included World’s End Harem, which was also a stupid and self-serious piece of garbage, but at least had a half-assed titillation factor going for it.

The line of defense for LOVE FLOPS as some kind of secret masterpiece is obvious; it pulls a classic trick of spending its first half foreshadowing a twist at its halfway point. People like this kind of thing; it makes them feel clever, and there is a real element of surprise. But what LOVE FLOPS neglects to understand is that the series must be compelling both before and after the twist, and LOVE FLOPS is neither. It is not compelling during its absolutely rancid first episode, which features a parade of harem cliches run through with a cocaine-snorting speed as well as two separate instances of a character being sexually assaulted by a dog. It is not compelling during its bizarre reverse-transphobia episode; it is not compelling when listlessly parodying some ancient idea of the magical girl genre and giving its token mascot character anal beads while doing so. It is, most damning of all, not compelling after its pretentiously built-up big twist; that the entire preceding series has been a simulation, after which the series simply switches to plagiarizing innumerable sci-fi works instead of a mountain of other ecchi anime.

This, too, has been done elsewhere, far better. Listen, I am a colossal sap, it’s not hard to get me to care about characters given twelve weeks to get to know them. This show’s (admittedly not terrible!) final episode made me feel nothing, it is a total emotional black hole. Like The Day I Became a God, which bottomed out the list the last time I did one of these back in 2020, it’s not that there are no good parts to LOVE FLOPS, and in fact it has frustratingly solid production values for something this utterly empty, it’s that those that exist make the bad parts—which vastly outnumber them—seem even worse by comparison. Bringing up The Day I Became A God is appropriate for another reason, because it is damningly clear by its end that LOVE FLOPS, in addition to being a terrible ecchi anime, also desperately wants to be a Jun Maeda show. And if Jun Maeda can’t even do Jun Maeda’s particular style right anymore, what hope did this ever have?

There is nothing of value here, and more than anything else I actually finished this year, I actively regret my time spent watching LOVE FLOPS. Let me be a cautionary tale; do not watch this. Neither you nor anyone else needs to.

#34. RWBY: Ice Queendom

There are a lot of tacks one could take in criticizing RWBY: Ice Queendom. It relies strongly on you having a prior investment in its parent franchise despite being billed as a reboot, but to be honest, that isn’t really one of them. Instead, it’s much easier to cite the slapdash production—some cuts look great, others look terrible, but in both cases it’s obvious no one is really steering the ship, because there is no visual coherence whatsoever—or the bizarre pacing, which somehow makes a single 12-episode cour feel like an eternity, or the strange decision to end the show on a lavishly-animated foodfight that is better both visually and narratively than the entire preceding 11 ½ episodes.

But really, you already know what the real problem with Ice Queendom is if you’re reading this. Yes, the tired, awful, no-good Furry Racism Angle, which Ice Queendom shamelessly resurrects and spends an ungodly amount of time focused on. Ice Quendom’s world features the Faunus, kemonomimi people, who are the repeated target of naked bigotry by several members of the cast, mostly secondary protagonist Weiss Schnee, and a truly stunning amount of Queendom‘s narrative resources are spent futilely trying to make this seem like a grey and grey moral situation, instead of a people being badly oppressed for their physical differences. Everything else takes a backseat to this, including basics like character development and plotting. For some reason, an inexcusably vast majority of Ice Queendom is fixated on the empty metaphor of humans vs. the Faunus, and it completely kneecaps the series. What separates Ice Queendom from LOVE FLOPS is the very thing that makes this series in some ways the worse of the two; it had potential! If it were more focused on the fundamentals and less on trying to wring some life out of one of the most overdone and undercooked stock metaphors in fantasy fiction, it might have been a good, or at least decent anime, but it doesn’t, so it’s not.

This is another one where it’s less a lack of anything good and more the presence of its very serious flaws that brings the series down. You can watch episode 4 and see what this show could’ve been if it had more focus on anything other than the oh-so important plot of Weiss working through her racist upbringing, and then you can weep, because it never gets back there. For the most part, it does not even try.

Even elements that ought to be interesting, like the surreal dream world that much of the show takes place in, are generally wrung dry of any real fun or intrigue by the fact that this show is so focused on trying to make you feel bad for Weiss that it forgets to do almost anything else. It is bizarre, it is offputting, and it is only through the fact that LOVE FLOPS basically doesn’t work on any level as a visual-narrative project that this is not on the bottom of the list. To be honest, I was tempted to put it there anyway just because I have gotten so thoroughly sick of writing about this show. Still; it at least is a show in its own right, and tells a coherent (if very bad) story from start to finish, which is more than can be said for LOVE FLOPS. So, second from the bottom it is.

#33. Sabikui Bisco

Let’s be honest, here. I covered this thing week to week and even I barely remember it aired. I can’t imagine how anyone else feels about this particular action anime washout.

The story of Sabikui Bisco is one of potential unrealized. Solid foundational points like an interesting setting, creative character designs, and an opportunity to put forward some legit social commentary are all squandered on a show that slowly and methodically weathers away its initially strong characterization and story over the course of its run. The animation and general visuals follow not long behind.

If you were to binge-watch Sabikui Bisco in a single day you could see the series degrade in real time like a fading photo, until nothing is left but a vague, shapeless gray spot. This fact ended up presaging what one of the two studios behind this thing, NAZ, turned in for the adaption of The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer, which, if I had actually finished it, would probably beat out even the dregs we’ve already seen to bottom out this list. Maybe, for the fans that Sabikui Bisco, the manga, must surely have, this anime is as bad as that one. For me, it’s mostly just a footnote. While it aired, I went back and forth a number of times between whether I thought Bisco was mostly a good show with some flaws or mostly a bad one with occasional bright spots. With its ranking here, you can see where I eventually landed.

#32. Love Live! Superstar!! Season 2

There is no reason this should be as much of a nothing as it was. What happened here? The first season of Love Live! Superstar!!, from just last year, was not the blow-off-the-doors affair of a certain other Love Live anime from the year before that, but it was still decent. It had some warmth to it, some color, some liveliness.

Let this be an illustration, then, of how fragile “decent” truly is. Superstar’s second season is not the worst anime of the year, certainly, but it’s probably the most disappointing for me personally. A series of absolutely baffling writing decisions—doubling the size of the cast, shoving the first season Superstars mostly out of focus for large chunks of the second, having the admittedly-cool antagonist character show up in a total of four episodes across a 12-episode series—completely sink the second season of Superstar as anything more than a curiosity. Yes, it still looks pretty nice in spots, yes, the concert visuals remain appealing, and yes there are one or two solid episodes. None of this changes that a good 3/4ths of this thing is a gigantic letdown. More than anything else, it is simply boring. None of the new characters ever rise above mildly amusing, and their meager story is not an adequate replacement for, nor an interesting addition to, that of the original Liella crew, which this season has a bizarre obsession with sidelining wherever possible. There is really just no merit to this thing for anyone who doesn’t have a truly crippling idol anime addiction.

But that’s the real nail in the coffin. If it’s underwhelming on its own terms, Superstar’s second season is an absolute embarrassment in context, being totally knocked out the ring in simple quality; in visual pop, story-arc writing, and character development by not only its own sibling, the second season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, but by a totally unknown, very different idol anime that aired in Superstar‘s own season. Spoiler alert; that show will place much higher on this list than Superstar does.

#31. Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie

Rounding out the firmly not-good part of the list is this piece of romcom cotton. In a year that had Kaguya-sama, Call of The Night, even My Dress-Up Darling, there really just isn’t a place for a romance anime that had this little going on. Crucially though, Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, unlike the last few entries, is not an actively bad show. I can actually imagine why someone would like it, which is more than I can say of Bisco or Ice Queendom or fucking LOVE FLOPS, but it truly is just a very standard piece of genre fare in a genre that had plenty of better options to pick from this year. Its weak central gimmick—that the titular Shikimori is, in some sense, “cool” (read: very nebulously kinda-sorta masculine. Sometimes.)—is not enough to push it past being, at best, a curiosity.

But I do have to give Shikimori some due respect on the basis of its visuals. Shikimori’s fairly nondescript story is still brought to glowing, gentle, pastel life by studio Doga Kobo, and it manages to accrue a handful of standout episodes that are much better than the show on the whole. (The best of these focuses on main character Izumi’s unknown other crush, Kamiya, a character whose elemental melancholy adds a touch of the truly human to a show that otherwise largely lacks that.)

I give Shikimori a little extra credit for another reason, too. This specific team at Doga Kobo is also the one who will do an anime that I am really looking forward to next year. And that story, set to premiere with an astonishing triple-length first episode a few months from now, seems like something far more deserving of their talents than the fairly anonymous stuff here. Shikimori itself is so-so, but in a very literal sense, it is a sign of good things to come.

And that’s the very bottom of the list.

To be honest, I always feel a little bad writing criticism this negative, even though people seem to enjoy reading it for one reason or another. If you’re in the camp who prefers more positive anime criticism—and if you are, don’t worry, I’m right there with you—then you have quite a bit to look forward to starting tomorrow. Even the least of the anime from this point on are a lot better than what we just discussed. (And to be honest, LOVE FLOPS and Ice Queendom are so rancid that I felt bad putting the other three anime down here with them. It just feels cruel, you know?) But I pride myself on critical honesty, and I did honestly dislike all of these shows. Hopefully you’ll appreciate the more positive stuff going forward, too.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) I Would’ve Written a Review, But SHIKIMORI’S NOT JUST A CUTIE

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Sometimes I open these reviews by calling something unusual, weird, or peculiar. This is not one of those times; Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, a romcom from this already romcom-saturated year, is pretty normal. It’s about a pretty normal pair of high school sweethearts, who attend a pretty normal (by anime standards) high school, and have a relationship that is, all around, pretty normal. This is neither a strength nor a weakness, on its own, but it’s worth keeping in mind what we’re actually looking at here.

Even compared to, say, the also fairly conventional My Dress-Up Darling from just a season prior, much about Shikimori is very much standard for its genre. There are really only two axes along which it will catch any interest; for one, the couple are actually dating even from the very start of the story, admittedly a bit of a rarity for the genre. For two; Shikimori herself (Saori Oonishi) is….well, cool. Princely, as more than one character puts it. The series goes out of its way to suggest that, between her and her boyfriend, the easily-flustered shortstop Izumi (Shuichirou Umeda), she’s actually the more masculine of the two. (This despite being shorter and having pastel pink hair. It’s mostly a vibe thing, and it’s usually sold pretty well.)

An important thing to note is that Shikimori began life as a series of Twitter comics. In their original form, Shikimori’s “coolness” was essentially the punchline to a joke. A very simple subversion of expectations that works well in that format.

As such, while Shikimori and Izumi, as well as their supporting cast, are definitely decently-written, both they individually and the anime on the whole feel underdeveloped. The main pair are cute together and I buy that they’re in love—I get why she likes him and why he likes her, which is important—but there is just a little something missing. And over the course of the anime adaption, that absence becomes more and more pronounced, even in the show’s best episodes.

But, let’s focus on the positives first. As mentioned, while most of the characters fall into broad archetypes they are at least competent executions on them. Shikimori genuinely does come across as pretty cool, and maybe even a little intimidating. Izumi seems nice, and is a total softie in an endearing way. Their main group of three friends includes a chummy hothead (Shuu Inuzuka; played by Nobuhiko Okamoto), a feisty wildcat who’s good at sports and also herself seems to have something of a thing for Shikimori (Kyou Nekozaki; Misato Matsuoka), and a stoic, somewhat snarky lovable weirdo (Yui Hachimitsu; Rina Hidaka). All are solid, and it’s fun to watch them interact.

Magic Planet Anime understands the glory of Hachimitsu.

Visually, the series is excellent, directed by a team that includes many staff who will eventually be making the Oshi No Ko anime. They breathe a sense of vibrancy into the school life setting that really does make it feel like a real, present place, and the set design in particular contributes a lot to that. Watching it, you can practically feel the Sun illuminating your face as you walk through the school courtyard. It takes talent to do that, and that talent is worth pointing out and respecting. And at times, it does manage to be genuinely romantic, with relative mundanities like theater and theme park dates blown up big enough that you can really immerse yourself in the emotions they convey. In these moments, when Shikimori is essentially at its peak, it does a good job of that.

And I really wish I could say those moments defined the whole show, that Shikimori lived up to such strong visual work, but mostly they don’t and it doesn’t. It’s pleasant, it’s decent fun, but it is rarely anything more than that, despite these highlights.

Fundamentally, it’s unfair to say any of Shikimori‘s strengths are in some way insufficient because it fails to measure up to some imagined version of what it could be. Things like that are pat and they’re rarely particularly substantial. Yes, Shikimori would be a bit more interesting if, say, Izumi was a girl (he wouldn’t need much of a design change to pass), but a criticism that basic misses the fact that Shikimori is routinely unwilling to commit to even its fairly tame level of gender non-conformance. The entire premise of the anime is that Shikimori is a cool, princely type, but just as often, it’s Izumi who is the assertive one in their relationship’s key moments. A trend that continues up until the last episode, where it’s Izumi who plants the couple’s first kiss on….Shikimori’s cheek.

And this would itself be fine if the show had a bit more fire to it. Comparing almost anything to Kaguya-sama: Love is War! is going to make that thing look bad, but it and Shikimori aired in the same season, and (spoilers here) they both have a kiss in the finale. It is telling that Kaguya‘s finale is a heart-pounding hurricane of grand romantic gestures that defy all common sense and reason, and the kiss that caps that episode is a full-on makeout. Shikimori just can’t compete with that kind of thing, even with all the visual panache in the world. It can’t even really compete with the aforementioned Dress-Up Darling, a series that is in many respects much less consistent, but by simply having the running plot of two crazy kids who aren’t dating yet but clearly eventually will be, it feels much more urgent. And, frankly, that show’s unabashed horniness—tasteless as it could often get—feels more reflective of a lived-in teenage experience than Shikimori is. (So does Kaguya, despite its absurd premise and in-theory unrelatable rich kid cast, for that matter.)

As it is, Shikimori is clearly is aiming for a laid-back, iyashikei-esque easy pace. It achieves that, so it’s perhaps even more unfair to complain that that’s “all” it does. But at the same time, this absence of any more substantial emotional weight is highlighted by the show itself, because when it can find a piece of the original story that it can make something truly wild out of, it does so with gusto.

Take, for example, the side character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara).

Kamiya once fell hard for Izumi, too, but no longer pursues him because she knows he’s taken, and she has no chance. Over the course of the episode-ish’s worth of material that focuses on her, she imagines herself as a counterfeit Cinderella, her glass slippers and Prince Charming alike missing.

The series itself bends around her, bringing a rainy overcast to the serene high school rooftop, threatening a Biblical flood. Hers is a deep, dramatic, and messy love. And it demands a story louder, wilder, and more complicated than Shikimori, one that could accommodate the drama that inherently comes along with this kind of thing. But Shikimori is not that story, and her feelings prove too much of a challenge for it to wholly untangle. It’s not coincidental that when her short arc reaches its conclusion, she essentially disappears from the show entirely.

It still feels wrong to judge a series based on what it isn’t, rather than what it is. But the pieces of the show that focus on Kamiya—and other, smaller shards of something that is simply bigger than the rest of the series, always out of shot or between the frames—almost demand you to imagine a world beyond Shikimori‘s fairly limited notion of teenage romance. There is a lot else out there, and on some level, Shikimori knows this. In a few places, it almost seems frustrated with itself, that it cannot truly cut loose from the bounds of its own genre. The most obvious of these is perhaps the OP animation, which depicts a dimension- and genre-hopping pair of micro-vignettes for our lead couple, far removed from the series itself. Including even, perhaps most tellingly, one where there is a token acknowledgement of that same basic criticism I mentioned earlier; a version of the series in which Izumi and Shikimori are both girls.1

These two shots are literally all of Fem!Izumi we ever see, but they raise the question of why she looks so sad and troubled. In this tiny bit of non-verbal characterization, the OP animation establishes that she and Shikimori must have a rather different relationship than that between regular Izumi and Shikimori. The fact that I’m able to write this much about it is ample evidence both that this team is quite talented and that there’s a lack of stuff like this to chew on in the main series.

What you get, then, is a series that is a warm, personable elevation of what is ultimately very thin material. This isn’t to say that the Shikimori is a bad show—if I thought that I’d say so outright—but its origins as a gimmick strip on Twitter never really stop casting a long shadow over it. And in the end, it comes across as an elaborate expression of a very basic thought; “wouldn’t it be great if I had a tall, cool girlfriend?” Sure, it would be. Lots of people would love that. But you need something beyond that to push it past the realm of the merely cute, and Shikimori can only manage that in frustratingly short bursts. I find it almost impossible to imagine actively disliking Shikimori, but at the end of the day, you are basically watching six hours of fluffy Pixiv fanart.

The ongoing new romcom boom will do weird things to this particular period of anime in the long view of history. It’s hard to say if this show—or My Dress-Up Darling, Komi Can’t Communicate, etc. etc.—will persist particularly long in the public memory. In the case of Shikimori specifically, I rather doubt it. If it picks up a long-term fanbase, it will be a cult one, made up of people for whom the show offered some measure of comfort during difficult situations or simply helped them get through a day. To those people, Shikimori will be a cup of tea during an illness or a cool breeze on a summer day. To everyone else, it will be a pleasant, but half-remembered memory that pops up like a firework into the sky; brilliant for a fleeting moment, and then gone.

1: A correction: A commenter pointed out that this is actually Kamiya, which comparing the screenshots is obvious and I feel a little silly for thinking otherwise. Still, given its juxtaposition with all the alternate universe stuff I think my confusion is a bit more understandable, and my larger point still stands.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.