DAMN YOU WILLIS

For those who don’t know, Saikano is also called (or is it the subtitle or something? I forget) “My Girlfriend the Ultimate Weapon”. And yes, his girlfriend is a military experiment as well as being a sweet, gentle young high school girl, and it’s exactly as horrifying as it sounds.

Although if I’m not mistaken, Saikano’s male protagonist was in high school himself and already in love with her before he found out about the experiments, wasn’t he? I dunno, it’s been a long time since I saw the first episode… I think it was back before it was even fully out, like, I saw a fansubbed preview at a convention or something.

Weirdly, not all of these are unwatchable/unreadable… you’d think Oh! My Goddess! would be terrible from the description, but the concept is so off the wall (heaven has a help line! Also, it’s a computer. And run by Norse gods. Who are almost all hot women) that it’s kind of oddly entertaining, especially when you factor in the manga throwing in random chapters about quantum space whales and the like… and Tenchi Muyo just about single-handedly invented (or at least popularized?) the harem genre, but the original series actually had some pretty good scifi plots and some decent character development and a lot of humor that added up to something pretty enjoyable, even for women (I say, as a woman). Even Chobits, which was pretty creepy in concept (not only does he have a robot girlfriend who doubles as his PC, but robot girlfriends that double as PCs are COMMON, and also, his has amnesia and thus acts like a child… who he has a romantic interest in. Ewww)… oddly readable. I mean, it was by CLAMP, which probably helped. But it actually sort of had something to say, or at least the manga did, about our relationship with technology. That and the art was pretty.

The funny thing is too, occasionally you get female-oriented, gender-flipped versions of those genres. Particularly from Yuu Watase, for some reason… she’s the one who created Fushigi Yugi, which is a fantasy series that wound up including harem elements, except the harem was male and the protagonist was a female, schoolgirl Mary Sue. She also wrote something called “Absolute Boyfriend” which was basically a gender-flipped Magical Girlfriend story. The boyfriend in question was a “perfect man” android the main character orders online. Yes, really. From a website. I know this because I read the first few chapters.

Although, that last one had some initial promise because it at least had the hilarious addition that, since she was custom-ordering him, and each trait cost a certain amount extra, she went whole-hog on perfection, ordered too many traits and ended up a million dollars in debt. Partly because she understandably thought the website was a joke…

It rapidly developed into a soap opera though, so I kind of lost interest. Especially since it was so obvious she was going to end up with her Unlucky Childhood Friend by the end of the series anyway. Bah. Shouldn’t have surprised me though. Most of shoujo (girl-oriented) stuff is a little soap-operatic, and Watase’s work most especially. Though FY had some interesting elements if you could get past that. Never did finish it though, both the anime and manga went on WAY long so I kind of wandered off before getting to the end of either one.

…

…Wait a sec…

I wonder if Dina collected skelflexes assuming if they were around at the time.

The sad thing is, he’s not the only incredibly creepy adult male ‘My Life as a Teenage Robot’ fan out there.