Asobi Asobase -workshop of fun-

Episode 11

Asobi Asobase has an usually high amount of continuity between its goofy vignettes, but this latest episode is the most focused one yet. It centers on the student council and their preparations for the school's cultural festival. The Pastimers Club largely feels like supporting players here, just hanging around the edges to annoy the crap out of the student council president. Not that we didn't already know the Pastimers were dumb and annoying, but you can really see how obnoxious they are to their fellow classmates from the Student Council's point of view. In doing so, Asobi Asobase really brings out what is great about this show: In focusing so tightly, it gives itself even more room to unwind. By the end of the episode, everything has gone completely bananas, in a way this show hasn't in several episodes. It's refreshing.

The Pastimers Club is frustrated because the student council president refuses to approve Kasumi's sci-fi "masterpiece" for the cultural festival. It's not hard to see why, what with them torturing alien characters by "shoving an onion head doll" up their butts. Even when they cut the offending scene, they're still hesitant to approve it—probably because the whole thing is just wildly and stupidly offensive. So in that sense, the episode focuses on their quest for approval, one in which they eventually succeed. But it's mostly told from the president and vice president's perspectives, and we get various detours to other familiar characters, like the occult club. They get their own little segment about a bake sale for the festival, which also has some comical unintended consequences.

Mostly, we learn a lot about why the president is so grouchy: It seems like every club in this school is bonkers in its own way. The art club designed a cultural festival poster full of surrealist nudity, refusing to paint anything else, which the president must now attempt to defend. I don't know what's in the water at the school in Asobi Asobase, but it made me wish this show was twice as long so we could learn more about all the different types of weirdos in its student body. On top of having to wrangle all those clubs, she has a vice president who clearly doesn't take her job remotely seriously. She's always going for "meetings" with the student council at Opposite-san—the boys' school across the street, whom they jointly plan events like the culture festival with—but it's clear she's really going there to meet boys for dates. The narrator even reveals that the vice president is dating "all six" members of the Opposite-san student council, and hints at some huge fight resulting from this that we don't get to see.

The vice president is a fun new character. At first, I worried she would be another jab at "slutty" girls, but I liked how the show focused on how much artifice goes into the personality she presents to the boys. When she's at the girls' school, she looks gross (with the teacher asking "why are you always damp?") and has a grumpy demeanor not dissimilar to the student council president. I like how the show set that up; when Kasumi talks about them being the same, maybe she mistook the vice president for the president. After all, you wouldn't put it past the idiots in the Pastimers Club to mistake the same person for two people. And yet, the reveal makes it clear she probably was telling the truth. The vice president just has wildly different personalities depending on whether or not she's about to go out with the boys. It's enough that when one of her boyfriends, the Opposite-san president, comes over, he mistakes the makeup-less VP for a monster. This leads to the ridiculous final segment, where she knocks him out, he looks like a corpse, and there's a bizarro "murder mystery" that brings the whole cast together. Anyway, I liked the way that this new character felt like a clever commentary on all the work girls feel the need to put into our appearances. Yeah, she's obviously being silly comparing the bare version of her face to boys "having their wangs out." (Whichever Crunchyroll translator is handling the subs for this show, you're clearly having a ton of fun with it and I salute you.) But isn't that kind of how it feels sometimes?

While this episode introduces a fun new character in the form of the VP, it also functions as a reunion of sorts for past characters. That means that when the Pastimers Club makes one last appeal for their movie, we get the return of Maeda and his laser cannon butt (yay!) and Olivia's creepy brother (eh). The part focusing on the occult club could also count as a reunion, and ties in with the "out of focus" aspect of this episode. We get to see them make sweets, the president wildly overreact when she thinks Hanako's Black Lips are a result of her cooking (instead of squid ink), and then what results when the occult club puts actual magical essence into their sweets. I like how everyone seems to expect that something is seriously wrong with their food, and then is surprised when it's normal—and how that backfires on them in various different ways. I also liked the reveal that Agrippa was actually the weirder one of the pair, something I didn't think was possible.

It's fun to watch this show see how far it can push its jokes. It also keeps everything pretty squarely in its comfort zone: absurd, random humor that manages to twist itself into these weird little corners by building and building on an already-ridiculous premise. There were parts I could've done without. Olivia's brother is creepy and also drains the energy of every scene he's in. Overall, though, this was a consistently funny and strange episodes that showcases Asobi Asobase at its best. And like all the best episodes of this show, it had some great butt-laser action. Maeda is always ready to weird out a whole new set of characters whenever needed, and that's how I like it.

Rating: A

Asobi Asobase -workshop of fun- is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rose is a Ph.D. student in musicology, who recently released a book about the music of Cowboy Bebop. You can also follow her on Twitter.