12.19
Shimoneta and Prison School made plenty of controversy this year involving obscenities, sexuality, and a certain dub line that I’ll decline to talk about. They were made to challenge controversies to the point where even fans of this comedy style would get annoyed at how much their excesses invaded the screen. Subtlety was unheard of as episode after episode of these two shows pumped out meat for Sankaku Complex articles while some couldn’t tell whether or not these shows were meant to criticize societal norms or just be exploitation for its own sake. There hasn’t been any definitive word on how one should view the subject matter. Even long after those names are forgotten, anime fans will still discuss love nectar and Kana Hanazawa getting pissed on with sick interest. These shows being more victims of abundant censorship does not help.
Shimoneta for the most part had an indecisive run. The first episode felt like an overeager Catholic school giggling because she heard the word ‘fuck’ for the first time. Swears and phallic objects were considered jokes in and of themselves, which is less what you expect from a satire and more from a kid who masturbates to a pair of oranges. Maybe it can be justified through Japan’s tyrannical censorship laws, but I’ve seen better dirty jokes from anime. I’ve laughed at hentai before, so this show’s platform was already in question from the beginning. Then, the show revealed Anna was a crazy-ass ho. She pushed the innuendos that we had all seen a thousand times into insanity by pissing out a rainbow of love nectar when falling down a cliff. She was the perverse insanity that Kajo and the rest of SOX wished they could be, encapsulating the kind of society that bans sexual education in favor of faked innocence. By constantly trying to rape Tanukuchi, she gave Shimoneta the kind of abhorrent subject matter it needed to show what it fought against. Otherwise, it would have been an argument without much of a point.
Prison School was more visceral, if only for the more realistic designs aside from Andre. Some people straight up called this a feminist work, whereas critics accused the series as nothing but more exploitation except this time for the dominatrix demographic. If you wanted to see hot women assault men over and over until they were red in the face, you needed this anime in your life. Otherwise, when does any anime ever portray women being the doms in the situation? Like Shimoneta, it was a refreshing take on on-screen sleaziness, yet it strikes me how this show received a live-action adaptation just after the anime ended. That just leaves me dumbstruck.