Afterthoughts – School Rumble

We typically don’t get into romcoms or high school settings. Not even just on the podcasts we upload twice weekly but also in general terms. Until we saw Gantz last October, I claimed Shuffle! as my most hated anime of all time – a show that is pretty much the epitome of everything that is bad and dumb about fantasy-themed high school harem stories adapted from eroge.

So School Rumble, just like Ouran and Nozaki-kun, is something of an odd duck for us.

I still think I brought my cohost Xevabis to the high school romcom a bit prematurely, a few months later and he might have actually liked School Rumble the way I do, what with my legitimately-purchased DVD and all, and his later love of Ouran High School Host’s Club proves that he had the potential to enjoy this kind of fare all along; it just needed to be nurtured. Modern high school romcoms have also become more. . I dunno, sane? A lot of the more bizarre points that made the early 2000’s harem shows so grating seem to have been sandblasted off, or at least sanded down somewhat, in an effort to make the stories more palatable to a wider audience.

Or maybe that’s just because the source material has been coming less from the grimy unlit basements that are eroge and doujinshi sub-communities and instead being based on works of literature, a la No Game No Life. I mean, stuff like Amagami SS will always be around, at least as long as lonely nerds stroll Akiba looking for new H games. But at least there’s enough of these new, innocent, goofy little romcoms running around that you don’t have to sit in the corner and grumpily wonder why everything is a harem, now.

-Moof

Afterthoughts – The Irregular at Magic High School

If you listened to the Aldnoah.Zero podcast before this, you’ll notice that this podcast isn’t High School DxD. I made the mistake of assuming Hulu had all the episodes when in reality they only had the first 2 of the first season, so DxD was pushed back a week. We instead watched a show that Mr. Xombie was interested in and was on Netflix, The Irregular at Magic High School.

Mr. Xombie and the rest of us went from being interested to bored as hell within the first ten minutes. The protagonist who is perfect at most everything, girls just want him, and his sister wants him as well. I might’ve been ok with all this shit if it was interesting at all. Classism between those that can and can’t practice magic should be an interesting story, but it’s presented in a wholly uninteresting way.

If you remember last year, we rarely watched things that we disliked, let alone hated. This year I already have four things on my worst of 2016 list. This is a solid two right now behind DxD. I won’t say it won’t get pushed out of this list, but we are definitely going out of our comfort zones this year.

-Xevabis