It’s possible that otaku-focused anime have gone through the looking glass and come out the other side. Here we have a show that both plays to well-worn anime and dating sim tropes, but does so quite openly and often shamelessly. At the same time, it tries to get some mileage from being self-aware and mocks the very cliches it is trading upon to keep the audience happy. Can you have your pander-cake and eat it too?
What They Say:
One day, an otaku high school student Tomoya Aki has a fateful encounter with a girl. This meeting inspires Tomoya to design his very own “gal-game” featuring a heroine modeled after the girl he saw. In order to make his desire a reality, Tomoya must persuade a few eccentric “creators” such as the ace member of the art club, Eriri Spencer Sawamura and the school’s top student, Utaha Kasumigaoka to join his development team. Meanwhile, Tomoya is shocked to learn that the girl he idolized as his muse for this whole project was none other than his boring classmate, Megumi Kato!
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
When I first read the premise for Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata, which has been given the English title Saekano–How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend, I was not entirely sure how to react. An avowed otaku finds out that the girl who has inspired him to build a dating sim based upon her is actually a classmate of his…and a boring one at that. So, in addition to making the game with her as the heroine, he intends to mold her into a perfect game heroine at the same time. The artwork looked potentially interesting and the staff involved piqued my interest. While this show is based upon a series of light novels, the writer and original creator behind it all, Fumiaki Maruto, is in charge of the anime’s writing. The subject matter is something he knows well as he is also a writer and creator of visual novels (he co-wrote the game White Album 2 for the developer Leaf). The director is Kanta Kamei, who also directed the highly genre-aware and otaku-focused Oreshura. There was a hint of promise here in this pairing.
So, how did it turn out? Saekano sets out a rather difficult task for itself, walking a tightrope with two rather heavy weights balanced on each side of the pole: on the one hand playing to well-worn anime, light novel, and galge (dating simulations usually involving a male player trying to find romance with a typical assortment of attractive females) tropes; on the other, commenting and even mocking them. When it comes to shows of this sort, they can be interesting and amusing (and titillating and even all three), but it is a rather tricky business to strike the right balance. It is difficult to have your cake (whether it be cheese or pure boosterism frosting) and eat it too. Other shows have attempted to walk this same tightrope, with very mixed results.
In some senses, Kamei’s earlier work Oreshura already trod this path, though centered more on the chuuni phenomenon, which is a sub-genre that I think has now been thoroughly explored. (Sadly, real life chuuni are hard at work creating endless iterations of the same dull ego trip over and over again. Memo to Japanese publishers: please stop publishing shallow and infantile wish-fulfillment fantasies by hack writers that inevitably get made into anime. It’s diverting resources that could be utilized better elsewhere). The shows that have provided a critique of the condition, such as Chu2koi and Oreshura, have proven to be more palatable, but we’ve probably had enough of them too. Coming back to our topic, I liked the latter show for its occasional sting and bite, though it did not make any serious assault on the subject of its commentary (to be fair, neither have any of the others). Still, perhaps here with Saekano there was a chance to show a little more backbone and tackle head-on a facet of otaku culture, this time from the visual novel/galge/dating sim angle.
In the end, there was little bravery in evidence, though the show was not pure pandering either. A measured balance reigned for the most part, though the pole perhaps tilted more towards pandering than critiquing overall during the full run. The tone was, in many ways, set from the start, with the pre-emptive postscript that began the broadcast run, Episode 0. Sometimes, Episode “0s” are used as a preview or even prequel to the show that is to follow. Here, it is an epilogue, showing us events that we will learn take place after the entire series is over. It’s the hot springs OVA, literally, that we very often find included as the bonus episode on the home video release well after the original broadcast run is completed.
But that’s something of a ruse, since the episode serves quite well as an introduction to the entire cast (otherwise, you would not have met one of the main characters until well into the show’s regularly numbered installments) and their personalities. Though it serves as an adequate introduction to the basic plot, it is also highly instructive about the show’s intentions: it’s loaded with fanservice while at the same time having a rather detailed discussion about the problems with otaku entertainment and the whole subculture and its fans. While the discussion is quite interesting, the episode is also littered with visual and dramatic situations that work to divert the audience’s attention away from the fact that we are probably quite confused about what is really going on at this point. We get a view into the world of Tomoya Aki and his game-creating circle, but a disjointed one. It’s like getting a complete, but entirely hazy, picture of what an assembled jigsaw puzzle looks like, but you can’t recall how the pieces managed to fit together.
