Imagine if you will a scenario like Shakugan no Shana, where a normal boy is introduced to a world of demons that will be trying to kill him with a super-powered girl at his side to protect him while he learns the ropes of the Urban Fantasy nightmare he’s in, but with added Harem elements and a much steamier romance in general. It could turn out pretty impressive, and in fact there are a few shows, such as Trinity Seven, Brynhildr in the Darkness, and most Trigger productions, that successfully navigate being both full of good fanservice and high drama. The ratios vary but it absolutely can be done and it does reap rewards when a creator pulls it off. As with just about anything else, there’s not a qualitative problem with fanservice existing; you execute it with skill and it can and will be a net positive.
On the other hand, imagine if you will a scenario like Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, but with a more consistent plot and several incidents like the one with the dragon. That could be pretty good. Yuuna could have borne more weight than the fluff it was, and you might be more invested in the characters if you occasionally saw them in more harrowing situations than misapplied love potions or clothes-dissolving fiends. As long as it never loses sight of the fact that it’s pretty goofy at heart (the way Yuuna doesn’t even through the Dragon arc), it could play well to have a little extra meat.
These two possibilities do seem to be approaching a middle point, but when they meet it’s less a joining of separate ends of a continuous spectrum and more a collision of freight trains moving opposite directions on the same track. Omamori Himari is that train wreck.
The basic outlay is that our main character, Yuto, is your typical amnesia-for-important-childhood sort of protagonist, who discovers that he’s actually the last scion of a demon hunter family when he’s attacked by a monster possessing his friend and protected by a mysterious busty catgirl who introduces herself as Himari, a monster bound to the service of his family, and his sworn protector in particular.
Himari is also clearly very interested in pursuing romance with Yuto, barely constrained by his cat allergy that, in a comedic gutter ball, hardly ever comes up. She’s not alone, though. By the end, extremely not alone since Omamori Himari is one of the larger Harems I’ve seen, if not the largest I’m personally familiar with, but at the start she just has to deal with Rinko, Yuto’s tsundere “childhood friend” (I put that in quotes because she has no relation to the lost days of Yuto’s childhood when other characters do) whose sole contribution to the story once there are a couple more bodies to fill space and fanservice quotas is to perform a single joke at least once an episode (not counting the one in the intro): she finds Yuto in some sort of compromising situation with one or more of the other girls, gets mad, and either hits him or throws something at him
After that, the show is pretty much just concerned with introducing each of the girls and tossing them, sometimes unceremoniously, into the Harem, so I’ll go through the majority of the show girl by girl rather than episode by episode.
The third girl introduced, after Rinko and the titular Himari, is Shizuku. She’s a water dragon sent by very concerned forces within the community of demon-kind to kill Yuto before he can properly awaken as a Hunter and start slaughtering them the way his ancestors were able to. She attacks pretty fiercely a couple times before Yuto’s kindness, interest in a peaceful solution, and lack of desire to harm demons, ayakashi, spirits, and so on that don’t pose active threats convince her to change tactics from attempted murder to “monitoring” that looks an awful lot like being part of the harem and trying to win the boy like every other girl we run into.
She’s also the show’s Rei clone with her lack of ability to emote, and its token loli with her childish physique and flat chest, making her very reminiscent of Supreme Throne Hecate from Shakugan no Shana, except instead of the somewhat intimidating sexual overtones of Hecate’s union with Yuji in the end of season 1 and her strange jealousy over half his merged existence (and not the human-shaped half I wouldn’t think) in season 3, both using her alien psychology to make her temporary interference in romantic matters that much more interesting and strange, Shizuku jumps straight to rubbing her naked body up against an unconscious Yuto in order to provide some “healing magic” that had no need to be that intimate. Omamori Himari doesn’t know what subtlety is.
The next girl up is Liz. She projects the image of a busty, young blonde woman (and can interact objects and touch people as such) but her true identity is a Tsukumogami, the spirit of an antique item, in the case of Liz a china tea cup that is her real, vital body. Yuto’s presence in the tea shop Liz runs initially frightens her, and she tries to use (tea-based) magic to force him to leave, which Himari sees as an attack and turns into a fight. Yuto saves Liz’s self from being shattered in the process and earns her eternal gratitude and fawning adoration, which given the fact that she’s mostly harmless is pretty much the end of anything interesting out of her.
From here, we meet a number of girls in quick succession, who don’t all properly join the harem right away (though be sure, by the last scene of the show they’re all there). Yuto takes a trip to his ancestral home, hoping to awaken his abilities and regain his memories. They meet a house spirit named Kaya there, who’s very much into Himari, and are then attacked by a Hinoenma (vampire/succubus thing) named Ageha, her one-eyed one-legged smith Ayakashi friend Sasa, and their summoned nasty giant. We get some information about Yuto’s familial ability, the Passage of Light, and that Himari as a descendant of violent and destructive Ayakashi has a powerful berserker state that’s likely to appear as she fights more. The three girls from this side trip don’t join up just yet, but returning to the city gets us to the next and most interesting actual Harem member, Kuesu.
Kuesu is a demon hunter of another family, who claims to have an arranged marriage with Yuto (a fact supported by a memory he recovered of kissing her when they were children) and initially plays the “harsh and cruel to the world but loving to her target” routine, demanding Yuto ditch his associations with the unnatural (including Himari) while acting generally violent and imperious. However, unlike any of the other girls in this show, Himari included, Kuesu actually has layers, and we find out as Yuto interacts with her and recovers fragments of his old memories that they did have a legitimate strong bond (which is why I can’t really count Rinko as the Childhood Friend – Kuesu plays those notes more deftly), and that he was very much a gung-ho badass hunter-in-training in those days. Their friendship is what inspired Kuesu, who didn’t inherit an easy win ability like Yuto did, to train hard and become a strong Demon Hunter, so they could one day stand together as equals rather than Kuesu being perpetually behind. Of course, with Yuto’s amnesia, the tables have turned, and he now has neither the skill nor the will that touched her so deeply.
Kuesu’s character practically gift-waps powerful emotions and interesting study as she faces the collapse not only of the future she’d dreamed of but the ‘truths’ she’d built her identity on. Even Kaze no Stigma, for all its deep faults, would have at least tried to address and utilize material so overwhelmingly prepared as fodder for the dramatic (and the Taisai arc, however useless to the main plot, and appearance of Lapis, however late and botched, indicate they would try). Unfortunately, Kuesu is stuck in a show even less competent than that one, and shortly after we see some of the depth she’s capable of she’s hit by the Harem Ray, transforming her into a much more mild, inoffensive, generically Dere version of herself to fade into the crowd of potential fanservice sources. (This is a metaphor. The show is not nearly self-aware enough to have the transformation of the girls from characters into moeblobs be explicit.)
Look what you’ve done, Omamori Himari. You’ve made me say nice things about both Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs and Kaze no Stigma.
From there, we launch into the show’s final arc. Ageha returns, seeking out Yuto’s blood to gain power and ending up intoxicated/infatuated when she gets a taste. Sasa comes with and helps mediate the two of them joining the party on the grounds that what they really want is protection from the something that’s been slaughtering and devouring various Ayakashi in the region (including, in one scene, the collection of Shizuku’s former bosses. She never comments on this.). The malefactors behind the spree of spirit-and-demon mass murder appear, a mature man and a little blonde girl who are identified as Shuten-doji and Tamamo-no-Mae – two fairly recognizable figures from Japanese myth and legend, notable as Bad News. In this incarnation, they’re out to obtain absurd amounts of power with a nebulous endgame to conquer and/or destroy the world. Tamamo takes a bite out of Himari, but the fighting is broken up. After another abortive encounter in the city and picking up Kaya for no apparent reason, they ultimately decide to draw the villains to Yuto’s family home for the final battle.
There, Tamamo and Himari fight, only to have Himari unleash her berserk side and thrash Tamamo’s true nine-tailed-fox form embarrassingly easily. Of course, after that she’s berserk, and also does a number to the other girls when they try to intercede. After briefly contemplating doing her in, Yuto goes for plan cooldown hug, which works well enough to bring Himari back to her senses for the final fight against Shuten-doji. They kill off the oni and Tamamo, emerging from the rubble in her human form, quietly slips into the harem group shots where nobody questions why she’s there or whether or not they should be worried about the ancient evil that straight up devoured most of the area’s supernatural creatures fairly recently. I dare say, it’s never addressed, she just joins the lineup of Yuto’s harem and it’s like nothing ever happened.
I’m sorry, Omamori Himari, but I’m going to have to call bull on that one. You’d think at least Ageha (who was running scared) or Shizuku (who lost everyone she supposedly cared about to Tamamo’s predations) would say something. But no, the Harem Ray got her, and that makes everything okay. Show’s over.
There are a few deep, constructive problems with this show. The plot summary I gave going through the girls sounds like it belongs to a serious show, what with life-or-death battles and world-ending monsters. But it constantly and reliably falls back on lame humor and dull harmless harem antics, defanging what might have been interesting characters by reducing them down to their competition for Yuto’s affection and some vague hints of what might have been actual traits had they been allowed to keep or advance their development, their uniqueness watered down to the point where it might as well be homeopathic after what you could consider promising introductions.
But you can never quite accept the show being totally silly and harmless, because fairly often there’s something desperate to bring you back to the idea that you should be taking it seriously. It’s jarring, grotesque in the dissonance between different scenes or even the same scenes… and then it’s drenched in incompetent fanservice.
At its best, the inclusion of fanservice is smooth and natural, whether it’s mild or intense. On acceptable levels, it will at least fit with the tone and nature of a particular scene so as to not distract from the other elements of the scene or have those elements detract from the titillation. Other shows with heavy fanservice components will typically follow those principles. When Emile’s top is split open in Hundred, revealing that she has breasts (and a big ol’ scar between them) the show doesn’t grind to a halt to admire said breasts in the middle of a battle with the character falling to her possible doom. Hundred was a garbage, lazy show, but even Hundred knew better than to do that.
Omamori Himari doesn’t even hit that bar. In the final battle, when Himari is berserk, she knocks out most of the other girls. We’re then treated to a long, slow pan across each of those girls as they lay unconscious or in agony on the ground. The dramatic music and pain in their faces says we’re supposed to believe they’re seriously hurt and in danger, as does the fact that it’s generally a dramatic scene, but the only visible damage from Himari’s attacks is to the clothing of her victims, and the slow pans take pains to show every rip that’s inevitably exposing breasts, thighs, or panties for the prurient viewer.
There’s no blood, not even really a scratch to mar the display of feminine meat served up, so it’s not like the show was going for the kind of sick but at least artistically deliberate blend of violence and sex that Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka reached for. They were just incompetent, throwing in fanservice where it didn’t belong, in a way it didn’t belong, ruining both a dramatic scene and perfectly good fanservice.
To make an analogy, Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs had the equivalent value of a Pop Tart. Empty, unfulfilling, and without much taste but ultimately mostly harmless, satisfying to a small part of the brain, and not really offensive. Omamori Himari, by comparison, is a Pop Tart spread with caviar and drenched in cream gravy. Technically, there’s more ‘good stuff’ in the recipe, but the constructive elements are botched in such a way that the result is a disgusting mess devoid of what little attraction the Pop Tart had in the first place.
It’s not just the mishandling of the omnipresent fanservice (I would not be surprised if a full third of the shots in the show were fanservicey). The core disconnect between having an explicitly comedic Harem and an explicitly dramatic Urban Fantasy story about demon hunters and such, is probably more to blame than is the window dressing You can have combination shows, which have both strong humor and strong drama, but bridging the two and mediating the tension between them takes skill and care, and I see absolutely no skill nor care anywhere in Omamori Himari’s production. Elements were just crammed in haphazardly, destroying any potential it might have had (such as Kuesu), and earning the show an easy Fail.
This is me reminding you to help control the Pet and Bad Anime populations – have your cat(girl demon) spayed or neutered! Goodnight.