The Summer 2021 Preview Guide

Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory Preview

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The story centers on 12-year-old boy Kōshi Nagumo, who finds himself homeless, penniless, and without relatives to care for him. As he lies on the street, he gets picked up to become the "dorm mother" of a dormitory full of troubled women's university students. Surrounded by idiosyncratic and difficult older women, Kōshi begins a "slightly ecchi new life."

Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory is based on Ikumi Hino's Megami-ryō no Ryōbo-kun manga and streams on HIDIVE on Wednesdays.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating: Five out of five failed background checks

I started work today planning to watch an episode during my lunch break and then write up the review during naptime, but then I realized I had forgotten to charge my laptop overnight and I was stuck with a three-year-old who refused to sleep and didn't have time to write anyway. Turns out all this was for the best because I'm pretty sure if someone had walked into the break room and seen me watching this, I would have been fired and possibly barred from working with children ever again.

Why am I regaling you with this fascinating personal anecdote? Because to be honest, the less said about Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory, the better. It's nasty as hell and I am already trying to actively delete details from my brain, because I don't want to be eternally haunted by the sight of a twelve-year-old being sexually harassed by a group of adult women with giant tits and asses but zero boundaries or even the slightest sense of propriety.

When I reviewed Nekopara, I grappled with the question of how to approach reviewing a show where I was very much not in the target demographic, but the show failed to be good in any other way. Goddess' Dormitory is one such… actually, screw that. If I were doing academic research on this show, maybe I'd formulate some kind of thoughtful thesis about how a presumed adult male audience is projecting themselves on this young child protagonist or the nature of shows that laser target a fetish so precisely they might as well be porn even when they're airing on TV. But I'm not. I refuse to even begin to entertain the idea of “objectively” analyzing a show where the sole source of comedy is putting a twelve-year-old in sexual situations, much to his horror and embarrassment. Objectivity in reviews is a lie anyway.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating: 4 (For the target audience)
Rating: 1 (For everyone else)

I'll say this for Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory, it shows you what it's all about right from the very first frame—and that's not hyperbole. The literal first shot of the entire show is a pair of nude breasts... followed by a shot of a bare female butt... followed by a shot of a different pair of breasts. Subtle this show is not. I mean, it's kind of commendable that the show starts out this way. The creators know their target audience and if you're not a part of it, they have no intention of trying to trick you into staying.

Softcore nudity aside, this anime is the latest in a decades long line of shows focusing on a young male forced into a situation where he is living with a group of stunningly beautiful girls—and keeps sexually harassing them on accident. All this is played for a solid mix of titillation and humor. Of course, each of the girls fits a standard female character archetype: the mad scientist that cares for nothing but her research, the innocent one that's too pure for the newfound perversion in her everyday life, and the older sister type who is self-centered and a bit overly pushy. There's even a short-haired dandere and a redheaded, pigtailed tsundere just to make sure all the bases are covered.

Or to put it another way, there is very little original in this anime—almost certainly by design. That said, I will admit to being surprised by the amount of thought put into Koshi's backstory. Being a homeless 12-year-old is a good reason to jump at any job you can get. And not sending a homeless 12-year-old back out into the cold is a good reason to allow him to live in your dorm—even if he is a boy and the dorm is female only. The fact that it plays into the story to create a bit a human drama between Koshi and Atena—with him not willing to make another person go through what he went through just to ensure his own comfort—is, frankly, above and beyond what I would have expected for a series like this.

When it comes down to it, however, this anime is fanservice pure and simple. It's well animated and competently made—and total trash to anyone outside of the target audience. However, if you're looking for some softcore smut playing directly into classic anime harem tropes, you'll probably enjoy this one.

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Nicholas Dupree
Rating: Chapter 109A, 18 U.S. Code 2243(a)

This show was dead on arrival for me the second I read the synopsis. Yeah yeah, I get this is mostly softcore fanservice and you're not supposed to put even a micron of thought into this kind of premise and just embrace it if it floats your boat. But this show is also airing on TV and HIDIVE is listing it as a regular simulcast, so I think it's fair to judge this premiere the same way I would any other, and that includes acknowledging how absolutely god damn gross it is to see a bunch of adults faceplanting into sexual situations with a 12-year-old.

Because that's the entire “joke” and appeal of Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory. Every punchline, ever setup, every given moment is dedicated to that premise and little else, and it runs through the requisite harem fantasy shenanigans as fast as it can. By minute four we were already at one of the adult characters commenting on our preteen protagonist's dick, and not 30 seconds later he was nose deep in a woman's crotch. By the end of the episode he's tripped into at least three pairs of boobs, helped another woman measure her bust size in a negligee, and wraps things up by getting squeezed between some thighs. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, go ahead. If it doesn't press your eruption button though, this premiere is 22 minutes of death.

Even if you're able to compartmentalize and ignore the fact that this is a literal child at the heart of this, there's just nothing funny or interesting to worth that effort. What few bits of characterization we get are all stock traits. This lady is a scientist (who walks around without a shirt all the time)! This lady's a cosplayer (who forcibly strips people she thinks will be good models)! This lady is deathly uncomfortable around men because she, uh, saw her roommate having sex once, I guess. But don't worry, our bland child hero will be sure to melt her heart by continuously tripping ass over tea kettle into her erogenous zones! There's a few obligatory attempts at sentimentality, but it's pure lip service to paper over what little conflict there was to begin with.

But hey, if this is your bag then the good news is HIDIVE is streaming the version with uncensored nipples, so there's that. Personally this whole premiere felt like stumbling on a stranger's Pornhub history in between reading random chapters of Negima, and it's not an experience I look to repeat any time soon.

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James Beckett
Rating: I would rather stare directly into the sun for a solid thirty minutes and risk losing my eyesight forever, if only it meant never having to even think about this thing again.

Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory is an adaptation the manga by Ikumi Hino, and it comes to us from Studio asread, the crew that brought us—
Actually, you know what? No. Screw the preamble. This show doesn't deserve the effort, and if I was even tangentially involved in literally any aspect of this show's production, you can bet your ass I'd want to remain anonymous. You want to know what this show is? In case the artwork and the summary didn't clue you in, here's the rundown: A 12-year-old boy named Koushi is homeless after his house burned down and his father avoided him. Since Child Protective Services cannot possibly exist in this show's godforsaken universe, Koushi is taken in by a college student named Mineru, who invites him to be the Goddess' Dorm's "dorm mother." Mineru also seems to be an active pedophile, given how she takes joy in licking food off of this traumatized kid's face, and in watching him be literally and metaphorically assaulted. You know. For laughs.

I'm not kidding. Throughout the course of this premiere's unspeakably long 23 minutes, we get to watch Koushi:

1. Unwittingly be exposed to the boobs and vaginas of half a dozen adult women.
2. Have his own penis exposed to the women, where his humiliation is played for another joke.
3. Get his face shoved into a lady's clitoris, which naturally makes her writhe and bleed from her nose in delight.
4. Dressed in a cat-boy cosplay outfit that humiliates him further.
5. Accidentally grope that clitoris-lady's tits until she bleeds profusely again.

There's even a point in this episode where the show has the audacity to try and treat Koushi and that girl he keeps getting accidentally molested by as real humans, with emotions and shit that we should be taking seriously. “Will Atena get over her fear of men (and prepubescent boys) and invite Koushi to live in her dorm??”, asks Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory, and the only possible answer is, “What the fuck are you talking about!? Why isn't anyone calling the police!? Why aren't any of these women in jail!?”

So, yeah. As was the case with Uzamaid! and That One Show About Some Girl Who Stalks an Elementary School Student (Which I Won't Even Bother to Google Because I Don't Want This Job to Put Me on Any More Government Watchlists), there is a very specific demographic that will get something out of Mother of the Goddess' Dormitory, and I'm sure they've already got at least one handful enough that they don't need to bother with what some critic on the internet thinks about their porn. For everyone else, though, the verdict on this show will probably the same as mine: It's unwatchable garbage, from beginning to end.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating: Half star

Welcome, everyone to Sexual Assault Dormitory, where a homeless twelve-year-old is forced to decide between being inappropriately touched and ogled by adult women and starving to death on the streets. The only reason this is getting even half a star from me is because I'm always pleased when characters have nipples, and these ladies certainly do. In fact, the show wants to be so very certain that you know this that their nipples (and the breasts they're attached to) are one of the most defining features of the episode.

Well, that and the fact that before even five minutes have passed adult women are commenting on an opposite-sex child's genitals before making gags about him having great oral sex technique when he falls into another woman's crotch. The level of inappropriate behavior around a kid is frankly breathtaking. It's as if no one in this show has ever been socialized. This isn't me trying be the Morals Police or anything, but more a statement on where this episode's priorities are firmly placed: fanservice is the name of the game and Mother of the Goddess' Dorm has zero compunctions about what it will and will not do. If that's not your thing, even if you're hurting for fanservice anime, I would stay away from this one.

What's truly awful here is that Koushi, the hapless middle school first year, is really in an untenable position, something the episode goes out of its way to make sure we understand. His house burned down, his dad ran off, and when we first really meet him, he's collapsed on the sidewalk from lack of food, commenting that eating scraps off the street give him an upset stomach. He's got no real options beyond what frequently-naked science student Mineru is offering, a position running the Goddess Dorm at a local women's college. Not even male-averse Atena can bring herself to kick him out, because it's clear that he has no where else to go. She's also the only one who seems to care at all about what makes Koushi uncomfortable, possibly because she's not comfortable around guys, something the show seems to find vaguely ridiculous and/or funny.

Anyway, the main takeaway is this: Mother of the Goddess' Dorm is a fanservice show about adult women making a middle schooler uncomfortable while acting like a sexy comedy. It's emphatically not for me – uncensored nipples notwithstanding.