Based on the light novel series by Hirotaka Akagai that began in 2012 and finished in 2016 with eleven volumes, Shimoneta is a pretty fun sex-based series that aired in the summer of 2015 season for twelve episodes. Animated by JC Staff, the show is one that plays up innuendo to a degree and just runs hard and fast with the raunchy material in a way that will make you grin, spit take, and then realize that other shows are going to have to work hard to surpass this one. Which is part of the fun of pushing the envelope. I’m definitely a fan of the sexy-oriented shows like this since we really don’t get them often and they tend to do things in interesting ways, especially if there’s some real quality behind the animation like what we get here.
The premise is one that takes the dystopian future angle in an intriguing area where, with its focus on Japan paving the way for a purer and more true world, the government has Public Morality bureaus that have worked hard over the last couple of decades to take anything naughty and remove it from the public and private sphere. This puts everything in a hugely chaste kind of way and those that say the wrong thing have the government come down hard on them. The idea is one that’s not new and the execution here is certainly flimsy, but by setting up morality offices within schools that compete to be the best and gain prestige by being the most moral, well, there are certainly worse ways to do it.
The show focuses on the best of the schools that Tanukichi has just entered it as a first-year student as he follows after Anna, the student council president and his crush. What’s interesting is that she’s his crush because she is so pure and true toward public morality and that’s what draws him as he wants to be like her. He’s not trying to corrupt her – in fact, she ends up becoming so corrupted throughout the show because of her attraction to him that it’s an amusing inverse of the situation as it’s not what he wants out of her. Tanukichi is a traditional nice guy but he ends up getting caught up in the actions of Kajo, the student council vice president who moonlights as Blue Snow, a morality terrorist who’s fighting against the laws and other efforts to make this a pure country that can lead the world. She does so through ways of bringing dirty things to the surface and there’s some fun variety to the approaches she takes once she essentially blackmails Tanukichi into helping her.
The gags here definitely work as the pair, along with a few others along the way, come up with their best ideas to get the student body to realize that there’s a lot to like about dirty things and embrace it all. Part of this is to stave off other laws that are coming down the pike that will largely neuter a generation in many ways but a lot of what we get really is just utterly dirty fun. Some of it is blatant to be sure but there’s so much material focused on the idea that these kids don’t know anything that when it’s placed right in front of them they don’t realize how sexual it is. That’s both a boon and frustration for Kajo and Tanukichi because it shows how much they have to do and just how difficult it is. Tanukichi’s reasoning behind being involved is fairly flimsy overall but as it goes on the obvious is there in that he’s fully on board, not realizing it, and also slowly coming to really like Kajo – though thankfully it doesn’t overplay a romance at this early stage.
From the perspective of enjoying copious amounts of fanservice, hilarious jokes, tons of sexuality, and lots of crazy moments, Shimoneta delivers in spades for me and I definitely enjoyed it – though eleven light novels feel like overkill and one season of anime is enough. But I was also really interested in some of the ideas they put forth in just how neutered the kids are here because they know absolutely nothing about anything. So even just seeing a couple of insects copulate puts them into such a frenzy of sexuality that they’re so pent up that you expect them to explode. Things are just so bad off here that you really do wonder how they can function at all and how there can even be another generation being born considering things are clamped down on in both public and private settings. There are plot holes like this to be sure but you have to ignore them so you can enjoy the mean feast itself.
A series like Shimoneta can be really terrible and there are certainly plot holes you could drive a planet through here. And it’s the kind of work that if you hadn’t seen it before, there are good chunks that have not aged well in the past ten years for obvious reasons. But it’s also the kind of show where you can ignore them, for the most part, because the series goes in some really fun and outrageous way. The further I got into it again the more I found myself laughing out loud regularly and just loving the absurdity of it and how far they push the envelope. The dub has a blast along the way, the series looks great, and it’s a fun package overall. This is a series that’s not aimed at a wide audience and it definitely embraces that element in the right ways which in turn made me really enjoy it for what it does. A little tightening up in some of the “world-building” areas would have gone a long way for me but for more casual viewers it won’t make a difference and you’ll just be laughing at how hard and fast it goes with these characters.
