This review is a companion to the discussion I had with
biogundam and ThoughtAgent
which I have embedded above. You don't need to watch the
discussion but the two complement each other.
Please Twins is sort of a sequel-ish spin-off to Please Teacher
so you should definitely watch Please Teacher first.
Both have OVAs which are pure fan service, by which I mean I
mean they don't really add anything to the story but are there
for the fan to get one last look at the characters before
turning the last page on the story.
I really like to feel fake nostalgia, as should be pretty
obvious by this website's layout. The web didn't look like this
when I got on it, no instead most sites looked like early
wordpress blogs. Please Teacher! scratches that fake nostalgia
itch, as it too is slightly before my time with rom-com anime
but not so distant that I can't pretend to have watched it when
it came out.
When I first consciosly got into watching anime as something
from Japan there was a period from 2010 to 2013 where I mostly
watched anime romantic comedies.
I know it may make me sound stupid but until the age of 12 I
didn't know that anime was not western, that it was from Japan.
This may have been because everything I watched up to that
point was mostly Shounen like Dragon Ball, One Piece, Yu Gi Oh,
Shaman King, Beyblade some of which were actually set in Japan
but which for the most part featured kinda surreal settings that
it was easy to miss the Japanese references, also I watched it
dubbed in Italian so there was quite a bit of localisation. The
first time I remember Japan being mentioned in anime was in the
Gear Fighter Dendoh mecha series.
To make make matters more confusing to my young self I also watched a whole lot of World Masterpiece Theatre anime like Heidi, and Anne of Green Gables, Rose of Versailles (not World Masterpiece Theatre) which were either adaptations of European/American novels for children and/or basically period pieces set in Europe.
Then there were series like Magical Circle Guru Guru and
Escaflowne which were basically set in western fantasy settings
which again did not exactly seem Japanese to me back then.
Thinking back about it I did watch unmistakably Japanese anime
like Ranma 1/2, Doremi, Mila e Shiro, and Urusei Yatsura,
Detective Conan and Lupin the third. Actually with Lupin it only
added to the misunderstading, because Lupin, especially in the
red jacket tv specials was always involved in some failed
heist/robbery saving damsels in distress in various world
locations from New York to Egypt so he never came across as
Japanese. There's a Japanese swordsman called Goemon but he was
the one who felt like the token Japanese unlike the other cast
who looked more like something out of hollywood.
To put into perspective how ignorant I was about anime, the
time I got a manga into my hands (vol1 of Detective Conan) I
tried reading it but I gave up because the story was not making
sense. I was seven years old. Five years later I came across the
same volume, now yellowed out and with the front cover missing,
and I realised the reason I could not understand the story was
because I had to read the manga volume back to front and from
right to left, as the instructions at the front I had neglected
to read said, because it was from Japan.
I really liked the first volume of the Detective Conan manga
and soon enough I had bought and read all the 80 volumes of
Conan which were published in Italian.I didn't care about the
fact that it was set in modern Japan - I was only interested in
the Poirot-esque increasingly improbable murder/detective
mysteries (seriously there is no trick to murder someone and get
away with it that Conan has not covered over its 1000 manga
chapters and 1000 anime episodes) and also in the romance
sub-plot between Conan and Ran. More than 25 years have passed,
their romance subplot has still not reached a conclusion and
Conan is still a 17 year old in a seven year old's body. To be
honest I would be a bit sad if it came to an end, those annoying
bootleg "Baker-street boys" kids around Conan can just die
though. I get it you gotta appeal to that elementary school kid
market - though maybe by this point it is too late for that.
Come to think of it Conan is the only murder-mystery series I
know of aimed at kids too. I say it's for kids because it's
basically a bit like at the end of a He-man episode when a case
has been solved, the show tries to impart kids with some moral
message, but in this case it comes after solving a brutal murder
case.
There's an old joke in the Conan community, that if you were to
meet Conan then you should probably run for your life because
there just happens to be a murder fo him to solve wherever he
goes sightseeing around Japan.
The protagonist of Detective Conan is also not a loser, or for
that matter "just your average Japanese middle/high schooler"
but is kind of a Mary Sue character but in a charming and not
arrogant way, a bit like orginal Sherlock Holmes I guess,
whereas protagonists in anime aimed at boys (and man-children)
tend to have protagonists who are essentially losers or
completely average because by the time they are in
middle/high-school the intended audience has lost any delusions
of grandeur, and so can't self-insert into characters who are
just perfect in every way. Basically they need some sort of a
Dr. Watson-like character at least to serve as self-insert for
the reader.
Anyway the reason why the joke about Conan going around
bringing death with him works partly because the story makes a
point of taking the characters around Japan and in the process
it feels almost like a tourist guide, or propaganda for why
Japan is a good, clean and beautiful country.
It's a bit like how the original Sherlock Holmes stories were
propaganda in favour of Britain despite the occasional criticism
of England. I mean Holmes basically ends up working for the
British government in the great war if I remember correctly, it
has been a while since I have read Holmes.I remember when I read
the Sherlock Holmes stories I really wanted to visit London and
go to the Baker Street museum. I was able to but unfortunately I
also ended up living in London.Just as Sherlock Holmes fans who
live abroad want to visit London because they have a
romanticised view of the city, so too anime fans end up being
fond of Japan for the same reason.
There's even a Conan movie (there's many of them so it is just
one among more than twenty of them) about Conan solving a case
of foreign espionage on a Japanese Self-Defense Forces
battleship. The country which does the espionage is never named,
it was probably China because they love to steal, but when it
aired in South Korea, they had to edit the movie so much not to
offend the Koreans that the Korean version of the movie tells a
different story. This is the closest I think I have seen Conan
being official propaganda, but the point is that even without
trying - just by saying an exciting story in the place called
Japan it turns into international propaganda in favour of that
place. As with Conan Doyle's SH stories I don't think it was
even meant to be international propaganda, but just as the
Holmes stories were just meant for a British audience but ended
up being popular in Japan inspiring Detective Conan, after all
the "Conan" in Detective Conan is from Conan Doyle's first name,
so too anime was seeing by eyes it was not intended to be seen
by.
Anyway this is not a review of Conan so I'll stop but I
consciously got into anime as something from Japan through Conan
so I thought it might have been worth bringing up. There was
another thing that Conan brought to my attention and interest,
the romantic sub-plot in a "mundane" setting (obviously the
setting of Conan is hardly mundane because it is full of
murder mysteries, kidnap attempts, FBI and CIA agents,
robberies, secret criminal organisations etc... but by mundane,
I mean that it is not set in the future or the past, nor a
fantasy/sci-fi setting but just in modern day Japan). There were
other series in modern day Japan like Ranma 1/2 but again
because the characters basically had super powers it didn't feel
real, same with sports anime like Mila e Shirou, the sport is
more important than the fact it is set in Japan - so it is
international in that sense, as for stuff like Sailor Moon once
again the fact that there was magic and monsters and a guy in a
tuxedo and a mask waltzing around sort of took away my attention
from the mundane Japanese setting, same with Mecha anime set in
Japan like Gear Fighter Dendoh - there's giant robots and aliens
fighting each other literally destroying the mundane setting so
that's a bit distracting.
Basically Conan contained the ingredients to my fake nostalgia
for early 2000s anime rom-coms, even if the rom-com bits were a
sub-plot/flavour in between the murders and the whodunit.
After I caught up with the latest vol of Conan I searched, and
I searched but could not find another detective anime that took
the whodunit mystery aspects seriously like a Sherlock Holmes
story would. So I actually read all of Conan Doyle's Sherlock
Holmes stories and I loved it but not as much as Conan, there
are many specific reasons for this, such as Conan having an
underlying over-arching plot that would be occasionally visited
and progressed in-between episodic crimes, but of course the
reason which popped out pretty obviously was the fact that it
wasn't anime.
Sure I tried stuff like Death Note, Detective Academy Q (short
but the closest to Conan), and Code Geass which were said to
have very clever charismatic protagonists but to put this
plainly and not too get bogged down too much in the details in
this already meandering essay, they were not as good as Conan
especially when it came to selling that their protagonists were
clever. Please don't write comments to me about that is not the
case, I am not really interested in arguing about cartoons, some
of the most unpleasant, pointless and circular conversations I
have had online far beyond political discussions, is those that
I have had with fanboys. For example, a few months ago I had a
nearly 100 YouTube comment debate with some attack on titan
fanboy on ThatAnimeSnob's comment section "arguing" that there
isn't exposition in Attack on Titan when there clearly is. I
don't like arguing about politics but I would rather do that
than deal with that level of stupidity and denial ever again.
Unfortunately what I found out was that Detective Conan was an
ever-expanding black hole when it comes to Detective anime.
Basically Conan is one of the only autistic murder mystery anime
where you get to see some actual sleuthing but inside itself it
contains so much that it is a genre in and of itself - a bit
like Australia is both a country and continent.
I also watched a bunch of Shoujo anime like Mermaid Melody and
Tokyo Mew Mew which had romantic subplots but the difference
between that and what I think about when I refer to early 2000s
anime rom-coms is that Shoujo is aimed at girls and has female
protagonists. The early 2000s anime rom-coms I am thinking of
are romantic comedies aimed at boys which have male
protagonists. These boy-oriented rom-coms have more in common
with visual novels when it comes to fan service and tropes but I
haven't seen any evidence that one was birthed out of the other.
Because I couldn't find the sleuthing aspects of DC, I went for
the other bit that appealed to me, the idyllic, slow, repetitive
romantic-subplot packaged with a rose-tinted image of Japan. I
would also say that these rom-coms tended to be far less
melo-dramatic than Shoujo romance but as Shoujo disappeared I
think the melodrama leaked back into these boy-oriented rom-coms
because girls don't get their own genre now, not in Japan anyway
(Korean webtoons/drama kind of fill that niche, in the west
anyway - I have no idea about in Japan itself).
Given that these stories focus mainly on the characters getting
to like each other or even just admitting to like each other,
they are a bit innocent and childish that way. For example there
is hardly if ever any actual and if there is, there's no drama
about unintentional pregnancies or whatnot. It's not supposed to
be realistic even though it's a mundane setting, the characters
don't really have any problems and spend more money than they
should have if you think about it. Characters do not usually
break up and if they do then will usually get together with each
other rather than get into a relationship with someone else kind
of to maintain the purity of that romance or something.
Basically it is a romance but it is as equally comedy, bad
things might happen but things turn out right in the end. If
they don't then it's a subversion like Clannad is.
The longer ones focus on the characters getting to know each
other and finally admitting their feelings to each other after
140 chapters or something but then they quickly lose steam and
conclude because after the characters get together there's no
way to maintain the stakes other than by making them break up or
something but if you do that too often then it just ceases to be
a comedy (an intentional one anyway) and veers into melodrama
like josei manga does, like Nana does. Itazura na kiss was
extremely boring for this reason, the characters get together
early on, and you as the viewer are left feeling as the third
wheel rather than rooting for their romance.
I think the proof of concept for how long you can drag a
rom-com where the characters do not get together till the
end can be found in Maison Ikkoku, one of the early and
best examples of rom-com aimed at boys.Maison is by Rumiko
Takahashi as are Ranma 1/2 and Urusei Yatsura, so even before
Conan I was already kind of primed to this kind of story.
From what I understand Rumiko Takahashi was one of the pioneers
when it comes to making rom-coms for boys creating many of the
tropes or at least popularising them. Her use of the
"misunderstanding" as a way of stalling the characters getting
together is kind of dying out, I remember people complaining
about it, but I thought it was rather innocent and cute, though
I must admit Takahashi pushed my patience beyond the limit a few
times. The love rivals and fake harems are usually though not
always just delaying techniques as well. Unless it is a true
harem like Tenchi Muyo where the protagonist never chooses one
girl but maintains a status quo where all the girls cock-block
each other whenever anyone of them is going to actually confess
or kiss.
The reason why I call it fake nostalgia because the rom-com
anime that I actually watched back then was stuff like Mayo
Chiki, MM!, Sakurasou no Pet Kanojo. There were a bunch of urban
fantasy anime like Shakugan no Shana which were slowly veering
to fantasy and then came Zero no Tsukaima which was still
a rom-com but an isekai aimed at boys (back in the 90s these
stories about ordinary people being transported into a fantasy
setting were aimed at girls with stuff like Fushigi Yuugi and
CLAMP's Magic Knight Rayearth though usually characters did not
die and get reborn in another world but were just transported
into another world like Narnia)- from that point onwards people
slowly stopped complaining about all anime being set in an
ordinary Japanese high school setting and started complaining
about all anime being set in a jrpg western fantasy kind of
setting.
I know that there are rom-coms being made every season like
niggertoro and Kaguyasama: Love is War and that pathetic simp
anime, Rental Girlfriend - something about them feels wrong and
I can't put it into words. Some of it feels too self-aware and
like riaju propaganda but I think there's something deeper wrong
with modern rom-com anime.
The last anime high-school rom-com I paid any attention to was
Oregairu (My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong as I Expected by
Wataru Watari) which reeled you in with the perfect cynical
self-insert protagonist (a trend started by Haruhi Suzumiya
probably) but then the protagonist becomes so self-aware that it
breaks the genre, the charm, the coziness and essentially tells
the audience to go fuck themselves as if that were some sort of
genuine insight which were baited into thinking we would receive
by the end.
Basically the protagonist became self-aware that he was not a
ronnery-loser like audience which was supposed to self-insert
into him and that broke the comedic aspect of the story -
because the reason it was fun was because he insisted he was a
loser and a loner and proud of it when in fact he wasn't any of
those things.
The rise of fake-tsunderes in teasing ani-manga also soured my
taste for this genre, the appeal of tsundere characters to me
was kind of that they pushed the protagonist to improve himself
but now they just berate the protagonist and just fall in love
with him without him doing anything - which is boring. I like
Asuka but this is probably her fault. Still better than Rei, and
her dead clones.
It's either that or that straight-forward dumb riaju propaganda
like that Bottom-Tier character Tomozaki, Tsurezure Children,
and I Can't Understand What My Husband is Saying with characters
who supposedly live fulfilling lives but are so boring and
bland that they ironically make the NEETs they look down
on, look good by comparison. They are saying "you're missing
out" and I feel like falling asleep. A problem that earlier
rom-com anime did not have for me, I don't know why that is,
maybe it's because they were more trope heavy. For example when
was the last time you saw a nosebleed in a modern anime, I don't
pay attention to new anime but I haven't seen that in a while in
the mango I read.
This brings me to Please Teacher!. Given the quality of the
artwork, this was an anime high school rom-com slightly before
my time. Despite this, it was still familiar and cozy. It did
not overstay its welcome and the familiar tropes for good. Only
a fool would say that the mere presence of tropes is a negative
when what really matters is the execution and the execution was
good.
I can't say I loved the characters as much as Biogundam did but
then again I did not watch Please Teach as one of my first
anime. There was a message about moving on but it was done in a
loving manner which did not feel resentful at all, not on the
nose. It's hard to explain why and how but when it is done in
good faith it is not condescending, it doesn't feel like hearing
voices from the room next door talking ill about you as if you
couldn't hear, as if you weren't there and could hear them
talking badly about you but you can only seethe about it, you
can't respond to them then and there because you are just a
viewer. Nor does it feel like disingenuous concern for you, like
kicking you in the teeth and then asking you if you're okay.
Of course if you think about it for a moment their
message gets inverted, and it sounds like a bunch of seething
normalfags set out to make an anime to cope about how their
wagie lives are more poor in quality and autheticity than the
NEETs and Otaku they are trying to gaslight to come join them on
the plantation. Inb4 slavery was basado.
This message about moving on was couched in the terms of
"accelerating" which comically reminded me of Nick Land's stuff.
Stagnation and and not changing was called "standing still." The
basic message of the anime was that reality is always in flux so
roll with it and bone your hot alien high school teacher.
The protagonist starts the series by lamenting that he would
have preferred if there was no entropy, if the universe stood
still it would make it seem more eternal but after having sex he
reconciles with the impermanence of things
That concludes my thoughts on Please Teacher Onizuka. Score?
5/10. Hotel? Trivago.
There was less going on in the spin-off, Please Twins - no
aliens or made up illnesses. It's not a direct sequel but it
happens in the same village town, you will recognise some of the
places. It takes place after the events of Please Teach. Some of
the Please Teach characters show up again but I wasn't that
charmed by them to care about it either way. Just listen to the
video I have posted about to hear our thoughts on specific
characters, it isn't worth going over them here. It would just
muddle things further.
I guess both Please Teach & Twins fall into the orphan
empowerment genre, which is not unheard of in anime because it's
a good excuse to get adults out of the way and a cheap way to
make us symphatise with the protagonist but it is not special to
anime either, everything from David Copperfield, Oliver Twist,
Jane Eyre and Harry Potter is an orphan empowerment fantasy.
Please Teach's protagonist is not technically an orphan, unlike
Please Twins, but he is basically abandoned by his parents to
relatives, so close enough.
Because there's less stuff plot-wise going on in Please Twins
the whole weight of the story has to be carried by the
Schrodinger's Twin "they could be relatives but they could be
strangers" premise which got pretty grating on ThoughtAgent's
nerves as the characters were literally repeating the premise
word for word over and over again. I didn't find it that bad and
just enjoyed the ride - it's just 13 episodes, I was also right
in my guess about who the protagonist would end up with. Making
you guess is kind of the point, I guess.
I thought that Please Teacher and Please Twins were adapted
from light novel or maybe even a visual novel but apparently
they are original anime, I know how rare in this day and age,
but they were later adapted into light novels and manga. I
haven't read those. Probably never will but who knows if I feel
whimsical enough though there is so much that I have put on a
backlog and lost track of, it is unlikely.
I felt like Please Twins was written more like a the kind of
rom-coms I was used to, on a moment to moment basis which
doesn't really mean anything to you but as with many other
things on this post, I can't explain it.
I am falling asleep as I write this so I'll start winding down.
Please Twins score, 5/10. I didn't hate it enough to give it a
negative score but it certainly wasn't good either.
Please Teach is the genuine retro anime but Twins felt more
like what I actually used to watch than what I sometimes imagine
I was watching.
I have already lost steam 800 words ago so what was the point
of this blog? I usually don't stop and think that sort of thing.
As usual, I immediately ran out of things to say so I said "fuck
it" and went where that tangent took me, to a little bit of
reminiscing about my history with rom-com anime, was it not a
genuine, authentic experience just because I was engaging with a
consumer product like anime rather than with nature or with
other people around me? I don't know so I'll leave that to your
judgement having read what I have said.
It was just as well I got some of this "personal history" on
digital paper before I forget all of it. I have already
forgotten most of it. That's kind of the point of this site, to
jot it down while the iron in my mind is still hot, it was too
late for this but better late than never. An advantage of having
a short memory as I have is that I can revisit an anime and
experience it again with fresh eyes again and again without it
feeling repetitive and by making notes like these I can compare
my previous thoughts and add to my understanding.
This article started out pretty badly but it turned out alright
although, as usual, I did not intend to write it. I had to cut
out a lot of irrelevant stuff from my manuscript which was
annoying but half of the fun is seeing what I'll cope up with. I
guess this is what is called "a happy little accident."
By Otaking, or [The Good Student]