A thing I've long said I was going to do is, "watch more anime." The "more" here is almost superfluous - in the long annals of the blog, of the hundreds and hundreds of seasons of television I've posted, how much anime have you seen? - but "watch anime" sounds like a whole lifestyle change, so just roll with me on this one. I know there are dozens of very good anime series out there from the last twenty or thirty years, but rather than go back and jump into a classic I've been poking around on Hulu every few months to see if some unheralded anime I've never heard of could lure me in.
Well, friends, I am equally proud and embarrassed to say that when I saw the above poster lurking on the Hulu interface, I knew I'd found something special. Look at that title! Look at those five weirdos in the foreground! Look at those, well, two very imposing figures in the background. Consider the possibilities. Is this a school set within a prison? Like at a juvenile hall? Is this cannon-chested, gray-haired woman in the background some sort of domineering teacher? Or perhaps a warden or prison guard? Or both? Do these guys want to fuck her? Do these guys live in fear of her? This was obviously a series that had no problem at all pandering to perversions and proclivities, but was this playing into schoolboy fantasies, prison fantasies, or both? Like a stupid moth, the moment I stared directly into this bright light and never had a chance to look away. I pressed play on the first episode, and what I witnessed was even more "ugh, come on, Japan" than I could have imagined.
So, it's set at a high school. An all-girls high school that has just changed its policies to allow male students. (Of course!) And these five guys, on their first day of school, decide to go spy on the ladies' locker room. (Ugh, of course.) Except - Japan! - so it's not a locker room, its a literal giant bathing room where dozens of high school girls are just giggling, stark naked, having the time of their lives. (Of... of course... Sigh.) The boys get caught, and they get sentenced to - yes - one month in the in-school prison, where they're overseen by a series of female guards - led by the extremely top-heavy one seen above - who just constantly beat the absolute shit out of them (in that way only anime allows for, where a guy will be a crumpled heap of broken bones and bloody bruises and missing teeth on the pavement, then spring right up in the next shot like nothing happened).
There's... there's a lot going on here. And so far it's exceeding every wild speculation I'd considered. It's absurd male-gaze fetish fuel, but it's also got this comfortable and confident sense of humor. It's not hentai or even mildly softcore porn, thank God, but it's also unmistakably porn-adjacent, or T&A-aware, or whatever. I'm so unfamiliar with anime that I have no idea if this is straight and earnest, if this is wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody and satire, or if I'm wrong to even be trying to analyze it on that spectrum at all. But I know that I must keep watching.
Over the next few nights I take in all twelve episodes, and honestly, I'm very pleasantly surprised. The creepiest aspects of the show - the peeping, the overt dominatrix-style beatings - are all in the rear view after the first episode or two, and what follows is an absurd but overall fast-paced and mildly compelling high school comedy. The three or four prominent female characters actually quickly become prominent characters, probably more so than two or three of the five boys in fact, and I find myself honestly invested in following the plot from episode to episode. First the boys work out an elaborate escape plan, overcoming several hiccups along the way. They're caught, and the girls realize that if they can frame two more escape attempts, they can get the boys expelled. Then they work out an elaborate scheme of their own. It works. Then the boys know they've got one chance to appeal it, and show evidence they were framed. And collecting that evidence requires another elaborate and hiccup-filled plan, and it works, and lo and behold, they're free, and that's the end of the season.
So at the end of the day, was it worth it? Close to six hours of my life spent on this obscure show from across the planet that literally no one I knew or even followed on Twitter had ever mentioned? Eh, it scratched a nondescript itch I've had for a while, I'll put it that way. And now I no longer have any desire to "watch more anime." (But not because this was bad!)
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