MAGGIE HAVE U SEEN MY HAPPY MARRIAGE,,,, THE MAIN MALE LEAD IS SO AKI CODED,,,,

I HAVEN'T BUT MAYBE I WILL HAVE TO WATCH IT NOW ABSBANAJjajjajqj

Saekano: How to Raise an Atrocious Anime

I’ve seen a lot of shitty harems, but Saekano might be the most masturbatory, self-gratifying waste of my time I’ve ever had the displeasure of sitting through. Normally in a harem you get the standard character archetypes that aren’t any more than their cliché because the rest of the direction of their personalities are “I love the main character, he’s so cool.” And yet in Saekano, the author somehow finds a way to make such a bland, whiny, painfully obvious self-insert as the main character, and direct the entirety of the other girls’ personalities into revolving around him and him alone. The god complex on this author must be insane, driven mad from “being an otaku” or whatever the shit Tomoya says to be #relatable to the audience.

The egocentric nature of the show, funny enough, is so prominent it’s how the show starts, and oh boy is it how it ends. The entire plot – the central, organizing premise is that Tomoya sees Kato one day and wants to make her into his ideal heroine. Immediately, her entire personality is now subject in the viewers’ mind with what Tomoya will make of her. In the first season’s beginning she plays the normal terse, little-patience archetype, but alas not even her gruff personality could hold out to the wiles of a constantly whining otaku caught already in the middle of a cat fight between two other girls, both inexplicably successful and inexplicably head over heels for him.

Even moreso as the show moved into its second season, they apparently looked in a book of “bad anime clichés” (that’s assuming the author didn’t also pen it) and found that being self-referential is really hip. So now the characters mention screen time and episode count, and yet the show doesn’t know what it wants to be – a wacky comedy about a guy stuck in the middle of mindless containers of fanservice or a serious romance dealing with the emotional struggles of a socially anxious high schooler and how wanting to put time into his hobby brings him closer to people he didn’t realize were so close already. No, no instead, Saekano takes the worst of both, and bookends the melodrama with sparse fourth-wall breaks at the beginning and end of the season. As if consistency in tone was this show’s biggest problem.

And finally, after so many blatant fanservice episodes, angry tsundere-talk, and talking about doujin games, we reach the final episode – the culmination of my detestation for this trash. Prior to the finale, Eriri and Utaha undergo some actual development, realizing they must put their own goals over Tomoya’s to succeed in their respective careers and dump his doujin team to work together on a AAA title, any and all hope I had for that to continue disintegrated. Firstly though, the end of the penultimate and beginning of the final episode are all about how Kato is now the true love, the girl that will stay with Tomoya, because even though he completely ignored her in favor of winning over Eriri and Utaha to work on his game, she still loves him just the same, as I guess “thanks” for mercilessly crushing any other personality she had into her final form as Tomoya’s ideal visual novel heroine. The author has molded Kato into what he wants, through the paper-thin veil of Tomoya as the main character. And because Tomoya is the harem main, he can’t not be loved, right? So after Eriri and Utaha make this decision, the end of that episode is Kato inviting Tomoya on a date, because there’s no way he could be without a heroine fawning over him, right? He’s the main character for crying out loud! It’s only natural! Flexing his power over the heroines in the story, he turns them away or brings them back to the main character as he absolutely pleases, with zero regard for any discussion of emotion or changes in character along the way.

And then we have the finale. Eriri and Utaha with their newly determined personalities almost got to leave the show less tainted then when they entered, and yet, of course, (following the first half of the episode being the date with Kato, with lots of #relatable “I’m a geek who doesn’t know anything about fashion!”), Tomoya stops the pair at the train station, as they’re preparing to leave for their new job. At this point I was honestly wondering what could make me detest the show even further, and then Utaha grabs Tomoya and deeply kisses him, bringing stunned reactions from both Eriri and me, sitting in silence with my head in my hands. Seriously – it’s not like I’m an upstanding white knight fighting for strong female characters – my favorite part of the show is the thigh shots anyway – but are you fucking kidding me? This is my central point in all of this: no character is anything but a romance choice - the entire show is a power fantasy apparently meant to satiate the otaku like Tomoya, but I would think all but the most disconnected NEETs could see this as nothing but attempting to gratify the main character and his creator. It’s pointless. Every other part of any character is just pointless.

Washed away in a torrent of spit and lipstick is any and all development Utaha (and of course Eriri) went through, confirming my view that this show is literally just masturbation material for its creator, dreaming of being an otaku who can also have a harem. While that itself might sound like a claim levied at any harem author, this is some next level writing, when you can not only make every girl in the show hopelessly obsessed with the main character around, but pointedly, specifically, directly make them sacks of the author’s favorite clichés and push them all on the absolute deification of the “self-insert harem main character” that is Tomoya Aki. Saekano is not for the fans, it is for the creator, and is that not a betrayal of what the industry about? I don’t claim to be a creative type in any capacity, but writing something so detailed to satisfy your own desires, and then marketing it in a mass-market a fashion seems to me like he should just write porn for himself if he wants to jack off to them. Hell, I’ve read porn that gives me more character development in 22 pages.

I despised every goddamn second of watching this show, and yet I stuck around for the artstyle, and because I’ve compulsively finished every anime I’ve ever started. Even with the stellar animation in both seasons, it wasn’t worth it. Not one bit. Sitting in fuming silence following that painful 24th minute at last ticking down, I was actually angry enough to put my frustration into words. This show is good for the gifs that show anything but the characters’ faces, so I don’t have to be reminded the disgusting motivations and empty personalities that lie behind their eyes. What utter filth.