This Week in Anime
Is There More to Onimai Than Fanservice?
by Steve Jones & Christopher Farris,
Onimai might have had a controversial first episode, but it's a surprisingly sweet and nuanced story at heart. Steve and Chris give the series a second look.
This series is streaming on Crunchyroll
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
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Steve
Chris, in keeping up with these exciting modern times, I've been workshopping a reboot of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Because nobody likes giant bugs or meditations on the absurdity of life anymore. So here's what I'm thinking. Gregor Samsa's kooky scientist sister turns him into a girl. It actually ends up working out best for everybody involved. And—this is the most important part—every single person on the internet loves it.
Chris, in keeping up with these exciting modern times, I've been workshopping a reboot of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Because nobody likes giant bugs or meditations on the absurdity of life anymore. So here's what I'm thinking. Gregor Samsa's kooky scientist sister turns him into a girl. It actually ends up working out best for everybody involved. And—this is the most important part—every single person on the internet loves it.
Chris
Ain't that the dream? To be able to put a story out there with no worry of controversy and a unilateral agreement on its quality. Such would seem to be the case as you and I finally make time here at the end of the Winter 2023 anime season for its least polarizing and most uncomplicated entry in Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister!
Oh yeah, this oughta be a short, simple column.
Ain't that the dream? To be able to put a story out there with no worry of controversy and a unilateral agreement on its quality. Such would seem to be the case as you and I finally make time here at the end of the Winter 2023 anime season for its least polarizing and most uncomplicated entry in Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister!
Oh yeah, this oughta be a short, simple column.
You know it! Although personally, I prefer this more literal and far more appropriate translation of the original Japanese title: Big Brother is Canceled!
But we can stick with Onimai for consistency's sake, I suppose.
But we can stick with Onimai for consistency's sake, I suppose.
It'd be fair enough. Who knows how the public might react if they actually got a look at Mahiro's browser history.
But then that's the funny thing with why we're here, given that the broader response to Onimai has been more nuanced and receptive than one might expect given the anime's initial reception. Speaking personally, I know I went into the show with a fair amount of uncertainty, only to come out the other side having quite enjoyed what it had to offer! Most of it, anyway!
But then that's the funny thing with why we're here, given that the broader response to Onimai has been more nuanced and receptive than one might expect given the anime's initial reception. Speaking personally, I know I went into the show with a fair amount of uncertainty, only to come out the other side having quite enjoyed what it had to offer! Most of it, anyway!
I'm also proud to say I'm fairly firmly on Team Onimai. While I did list it as one of my most anticipated shows of the winter season, that was a tongue-in-cheek move on my part. And now I have to retroactively apologize for that, because lo and behold, the series' charms and effervescent character won me over.
I'd had several mutuals whose opinions I trust posting excitedly about the series as it aired, and upon finally giving it a go myself, I could certainly see why! Onimai briskly settles into being an effective, beautifully animated slice-of-life show, and can be surprisingly earnest and heartfelt even as it's also making jokes about porn preferences or bathroom mishaps.
Also, one of the main supporting characters is a cool gyaru big sister. 10 out of 10.
Also, one of the main supporting characters is a cool gyaru big sister. 10 out of 10.
We are friends of gyaru here at "This Week In Anime," which is why I'm glad we waited until we got to the episode where Mihari gets hit with the gyarufication beam.
Maybe one day all these incredible scientific advancements will be available to the general public.
There are plenty of reasons to appreciate or abhor what Onimai is doing, and it's not difficult to imagine why it seemed like a natural locus of controversy. On one hand, it's dealing—in its own fantastical way—with the lived experience of transgender identity in some surprisingly poignant ways. On the other hand, the adaptation pushes some skeevier envelopes, like the question "how skimpy should this middle school character's clothing be?" So it's basically courting a bunch of ways to make people on all sides of all kinds of aisles upset.
And this is the experience we've really come to Onimai for. For my part, I know I found myself ambivalent about the series at the outset of the season, simply because I had no desire to get involved in it...
It's a specter that seems to stick to anime as a medium in particular and overshadow many a series, good, bad, and mid.
It's a specter that seems to stick to anime as a medium in particular and overshadow many a series, good, bad, and mid.
Discourse can be a nebulous word, though, and not all discourse is made equal. Like, I saw some commenters fuming at Onimai because they perceived it as the latest tool of the "transgender agenda." And obviously, that's not an argument worth having, because those kinds of people can (depending on the severity of the language my editor will allow here) go fuck themselves.
Oh yeah, that's absolutely an easy viewpoint to swing. And one thing I appreciate about Onimai is the way we get a series that appeals to the kinds of weird nerds in Mahiro's own demographic which also presents a story of a relative essentially helping someone in their care transition, and it's shown as a net positive and not akin to anything approaching "grooming."
But on the other hand, you have that "weird" aspect, and the way some people familiar with the manga, who was hyping this up as a plainly earnest trans experience story, were a little put off by that sort of material and imagery the Onimai anime put up front.
Can't imagine why.
But on the other hand, you have that "weird" aspect, and the way some people familiar with the manga, who was hyping this up as a plainly earnest trans experience story, were a little put off by that sort of material and imagery the Onimai anime put up front.
Can't imagine why.
This gets to the more typical way I think we've all come to use "discourse," which are thornier arguments, typically within a more homogeneously liberal-minded group, about a similarly loaded term: problematic.
Yes, here we are discussing an anime that has become a fave of the current season but deals with some problematic elements that might put people off. If only we had a term for such a phenomenon.
Top scientists are hard at work coming up with one.
But yeah, these are the conversations that drive anitwitter's traffic. Because shows that are mostly bad or mostly good are very boring. But anime that have fuzzier edges around their opposing constituent parts are, by nature, a lot more interesting to dig into!
But yeah, these are the conversations that drive anitwitter's traffic. Because shows that are mostly bad or mostly good are very boring. But anime that have fuzzier edges around their opposing constituent parts are, by nature, a lot more interesting to dig into!
Like, I think a fascinating issue with Onimai is the voyeurism of its direction. It's especially preoccupied with Mahiro's new pubescent girl body, which can be gross for a lot of self-evident reasons. However, this is an aspect that's also congruent with the story as a piece of transgender fiction. This whole experience is, in large part, about the body, so it's appropriate for Mahiro to indulge in that fascination.
The introduction of a camera and an audience further complicates this issue, and you can already see how this sort of discussion can have layers upon layers.
Part of the appeal of messier, problematic art is in questioning why the artists went in the direction they did. Yes, sometimes the answer really is "They wanted to peep at some young girl bod," but as you just rattled off, there are more complex examinations to be made.
On the other hand, this gets into the idea of self-selecting for content, and the point that viewers shouldn't feel obligated to soldier through material that squicks them out regardless of how many explanations could rationalize its inclusion.
This is one of the most important things you need to figure out for yourself to have a healthy media diet, IMO. Everybody's gonna have different tolerances for different stuff, so it's a deeply personal journey, but I think it's a valuable and eye-opening part of maturing into a well-rounded consumer of art. Which is a lot of words to say that I know I, personally, can wade through a lot of garbage if I can find an interesting trinket among the refuse now and then.
Oh yeah, there are always new horizons (or depths) to explore. As I said, I probably wouldn't even have looked into Onimai and liked it as much as I did had we not set out to cover it here. Similarly, one of my personal favorites, How Not To Summon A Demon Lord, started out as a review assignment that I was initially dreading at the time, just based on my surface understanding of its premise.
Funny how things work out.
Funny how things work out.
Oh yeah, my tolerances are also materially beneficial when it comes to stuff like writing for this column, lol. You might even call it an evolutionary adaptation after being exposed to so much bland anime. Sometimes reprehensibility, in itself, can be a selling point. Especially reprehensibility combined with incompetency. That's what makes Big Order so good.
That's the old critical bias in action. And it's just one of those components that makes extolling the virtues of this kind of material with people you know so engaging. So something like Gleipnier is messy and loaded with content qualifiers, but I know exactly the kinds of people who might go sickos.jpg over it the way I did.
Plus, you're talking to the guy who reviewed it for ANN! That was my top pick for that season, haha. Gleipnier, though, is a series that wields its body horror imagery and traumatic story beats pretty brazenly. It's like a David Cronenberg film, so I think it selects its audience efficiently. Onimai's cute exterior, on the other hand, is at odds with its plunges into lasciviousness, so that probably surprises and rankles people more.
That said, I think even "cute" anime should be allowed space to explore weird, off-putting frontiers. Which is part of what makes something like Made in Abyss stand out.
That said, I think even "cute" anime should be allowed space to explore weird, off-putting frontiers. Which is part of what makes something like Made in Abyss stand out.
Made in Abyss is absolutely one I was thinking of! Somewhat because at least part of its "problematic" reputation comes from dealing in prepubescent fanservice shots just as Onimai does. Yet even with that, and a country mile of other content warnings, Made in Abyss has enjoyed a much broader positive reception across the critical ani-sphere.
Is that just because its torrent of troubling tones better meshes with its messier status than Onimai's otherwise more wholesome impression? Or is it just because Made in Abyss waited a little while until we were all good and hooked before it made clear just how uncomfortable it could get?
Is that just because its torrent of troubling tones better meshes with its messier status than Onimai's otherwise more wholesome impression? Or is it just because Made in Abyss waited a little while until we were all good and hooked before it made clear just how uncomfortable it could get?
I'd say genre plays a big part. Especially in the critical sphere, people are more likely to be attuned to the subtleties of an adventure narrative than the subtleties of a slice-of-life comedy. If you'll allow me to compare piss scenes, for example (wow I hated typing that), Made in Abyss utilizes one as part of its overall abjectness, which ties into the brutality of the Abyss.
Onimai utilizes one as a way to show Mahiro's immaturity, but also as a means to show that they have people helping them. Now, you can argue both situations are blatant fetish fuel that contributes nothing, but both scenes are also framed in ways that are congruent with the series' overall goals.
And hopefully, that's all I have to write about urine this week.
The funny part is, the stylistic contrast can be just as effective in Onimai there as it was for Made in Abyss's mash-up of Precious Moments aesthetic and horrors beyond human comprehension. There was some impressive emotional whiplash I experienced there between "Whelp this sure is a thing this show is doing" and feeling some genuine appreciation for what a great big-sister type Kaede turned out to be.
I also found it funny how much I liked Onimai in contrast to Studio Bind's previous project Mushoku Tensei. Putting aside the fact that they're battling a thousand with the controversial adaptation picks, I think it shows that everyone's problematic fave is somebody else's problematic garbage.
This gets into that idea of self-selection, or at least knowing the audience you're recommending things to, that I mentioned earlier. There's no unilateral rule about what will or won't squick people out. For instance, I know someone who couldn't deal with the more gritty, grounded violence of the Chainsaw Man anime and dropped it after one episode. But they had no trouble with the more stylized action (to say nothing of all the fanservice) in Kill la Kill, which they loved.
Stylization, and more broadly all the adaptational choices and work that goes into an anime, are so important. Like, would I have enjoyed Onimai as much if it weren't so lavishly animated and gorgeously put together? Probably not! I might not have even checked it out. And with the number of seasonals that are being churned out, it seems we have fewer and fewer options for series that seem to have had non-disastrous productions. So I'm sure there are people out there learning to grit their teeth through excessive fanservice in the pursuit of the good sakuga.
Very funny that in a season full of production stumbles and meltdowns, it's the problematic trans-positivity anime that's been rolling up with consistently great work all these weeks.
Style can also elevate baser material. I'm thinking in particular of the anime adaptation of Yosuga no Sora, where Takeo Takahashi directs a neat, carefully composed, and nonlinear version of the visual novel. It, like Onimai, had a lot of thought and love poured in and around its raunchiness. It gave us prestige TV incest that predates Game of Thrones! I can recommend it to precisely one dozen people on the planet, and I love it dearly.
I cannot believe I can say this, but I've got similar feelings about another infamous incest anime! Now-obscure web series Candy Boy stands as a seminal problematic fave of mine. Not just for its great character animation and frankly gorgeous backgrounds which I'm devastated we'll probably never see in HD, but also, honestly, for its messily bizarre tale of twincest yuri which I could meditate on the thematics of for far too many paragraphs.
I have to bring it up here, because when else will I be able to sneak mentioning Candy Boy's past editorial?
I have to bring it up here, because when else will I be able to sneak mentioning Candy Boy's past editorial?
There's a definite power in problematic faves. And I think lots of people are drawn to transgressive media precisely because they create safe spaces where we can explore stuff not permissible in society. That's a feature of art, not a bug. This is why my least favorite flavor of discourse dips into regressive, puritanical notions of a media diet. Some of the most potent stories out there are by freaks, for freaks. Those are my people.
On the flip side, I do want to push back against the idea I've seen from other anime fans that weirder, wilder stuff must be pushed onto potential new fans in an effort to "filter" them through some of the predilections otaku media is known for. That comes off a bit gatekeeping for me, and it's frankly absurd to posit that just because someone recoils at The Toothbrush Scene in Monogatari, they shouldn't have fun checking out something like Bartender, which can get just as visually esoteric, but without as much of the weirder baggage.
Obviously, practicing critics like us have acclimated to the medium more than some others, but as with all things, there's nothing wrong with easing in at first. Even Saya no Uta lets you pick your level of problem at the beginning.
Obviously, practicing critics like us have acclimated to the medium more than some others, but as with all things, there's nothing wrong with easing in at first. Even Saya no Uta lets you pick your level of problem at the beginning.
Right! The beauty of anime—or any other medium—lies in its sheer variety and volume of it. Each one of us has a different artistic fingerprint that changes with each new work we create or absorb. One path isn't nobler than any other. That said, if we're close enough, I will show you The Toothbrush Scene from Monogatari. That's a promise and a threat.
Props to Onimai on that front: Its depictions of sibling relationships are significantly more wholesome!
...okay at least a little more wholesome, anyway.
...okay at least a little more wholesome, anyway.
None of us are free of sin, but some of us are less free than others.
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