To start off, a word of what we’re
getting into: this show is probably something like 90% Ecchi Harem
Comedy and 10% Light Action. There’s not a ton of meat to the
product, and what there is has a lot of standard notes. So, in some
ways, rather than looking at this as a review of an individual show,
I want to examine the formula. What works, why it works, and what we
should jolly well expect better from instead. This is still going to
be primarily an analysis of the show at hand, but it’s standard
enough that I want to keep an eye open for what’s done the same
everywhere and why.
It’s also worth a note that I prefer to
get my Anime through legal streaming means. There are a lot of them,
but this ranks a notice here because the one I knew to use for Yuuna
and the Haunted Hot Springs happened to be Crunchyroll and the
version there is censored – there are a lot of scenes where a good
amount of screen is taken up by extra thick steam or magical beams of
heavenly light. And for the purposes of reviewing a show, I think
that’s perfectly fine. While nudity can be used in an effective
manner for storytelling and atmosphere (and was in shows I’ve
previously reviewed, like Mirai Nikki), I’m personally of the opinion
that if a show can’t survive without drawings of nipples, well, then
it was dead on arrival.
Those programming notes out of the way,
let’s talk about Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs.
Specifically, let’s start with the
least interesting part of far too many Harem shows, the main
character. Right away we can start using Kogarashi to make a
checklist for your bog standard Harem main character. Some of these
are default for good reason – he’s always going to be a young adult
because that’s the right time of life for telling a
romantically-entangled story. Generally the main character will be
experiencing some significant life change, which serves to excuse why
he is just now meeting most if not all members of the Harem for the
first time. Isekai is a popular setup for that, but here we have the
much more laid-back moving to a new town. Moving on, we get a
cluster of traits that could together be called something like the
“Mary Sue Self Insert Recipe”. It’s not a charitable title I’m
bestowing, but I don’t feel especially charitable towards the recipe
that all too often tries to sell pig food as fine dining, so let’s go
through it.
In short, there are a lot of points on
which the main character is called to “have it both ways” so to
speak. For instance, he’ll usually be a dork and/or social outcast
to hook in all the relative social outcasts that want to imagine
themselves as the character, but he’ll have an astounding personal
magnetism (even if not explicitly) that results in most of the Harem
members falling for him fairly easily, even without him doing
anything in particular to provoke it. Points in Kogarashi’s favor,
he actually has a kind of decent setup for why he’s an outcast
despite being a personable sort of guy and chemistry with most of the
girls that actually exists. As another matter, if the show is any
brand of speculative fiction (Fantasy, Scifi, Urban Fantasy,
basically any sort of Isekai, etc.) the character will usually be
regarded as ‘weak’ or ‘normal’ in terms of any superhuman abilities
(for the same reasons as he’ll be a social outcast; most viewers who
want to step into the character’s shoes don’t have an impressive
suite of powers) but turn out to actually be strong to the point of
being functionally invincible, disregarding whatever ‘weakness’ they
were supposed to have. It’s the power-trip fantasy that people want
to indulge in, but combined with the ‘access point’ it makes the
equivalent of a hacked video game character who has no levels but
somehow max stats, which is a little silly from a narrative sense.
Lastly and most forgivable, the main character will always be a
red-blooded sort who is at least somewhat aware of the girls
surrounding him, but will always find some reason to not take
advantage of even the most blatant and string-free offer. I forgive
this because it is essentially needed to keep the Harem going into
the points where we can explore new girls, since it will keep the
Main Character from ‘settling’ too much on any one of them, seeing as
he probably won’t even reach the level of an intentional kiss or love
confession. Fundamentally, a story that is a Harem first and
foremost ends when the Harem is resolved, even if there is some sort
of other technical plot going on.
My disappointment with its prevalence
aside, not every character who can be described as being built with
this formula is a bad character. Other main characters can get
close, or check a lot of the Recipe boxes, and not have anything to
do with lazy Harem writing. For instance, Claire (from Claymore)
would seem to tick most of them, but Claymore isn’t even remotely
related to the Harem genre and Claire is a decently well studied
character.
Kogarashi? He’s not the worst
execution of the standard I’ve seen, and he does at least have
something resembling a personality that’s consistent and realized –
for instance, he’s set up as something of a chivalrous type in the
first episode when he can’t punch out a ghost once he’s seen she’s a
cute girl (satisfying his “interested but not willing” mark) and
this actually comes back to bite him just an itty bitty bit when he
has to face a female villain – but he is fairly clearly a product
of that mold.
A step up in interest is the plot.
Lazy Harem Checklist says that the plot exists as a vehicle for
getting to know the girls – that is to say, if you’re writing a
lazy harem you can do it in a very arc-centric or even episodic
manner, without the need for any greater overarching goal. The
purpose of each episode is to put “the girls” on display (since
they’re what the viewer comes for) but it’s hard to give everyone
sufficient screen time in a given episode and so the common solution
is to focus each episode on a subset of “the girls” or even just
one of them. As the tactics of Lazy Harem Writing go, this is…
inoffensive, really, when you get down to it. Non-harem dramatic
works (or Harem stories like Steins;Gate that don’t overall follow
the Lazy Harem Checklist) can also do individual and fairly
compartmentalized character growth arcs, though many of those will
have a stronger main plot that’s running forward continually. But
like anything, there are ways to do it well and ways to do it poorly,
so let’s look at Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs in specific.
Yuuna does follow the checklist
structure. Each episode will be about one or two events, which may
be predicated on one or more of the girls or possibly on something
supernatural going on that will involve Kogarashi and one or more
girls. There are ones that are more plot heavy (including a legit
two-part episode). However, Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs is
smart enough to keep a definitive theme for just about everything it
does. Since all but one of the girls are at least somewhat
supernatural, and the last one was introduced to knowledge of the
supernatural, every event at least has overtones of the fact the
characters’ lives are utterly swamped with supernatural experiences.
Not an instance goes by without either encountering a spook, specter,
or yokai or being reminded that the characters are, in fact, largely
pulled from such lists. It’s not the worst thing, though I’d be
lying if I said there wasn’t a bit much repetition of “Yuuna gets
into an improbably lewd position with Kogarashi while they’re asleep,
wakes up, freaks out, and hurls him violently into the sky.”
That leaves me considering the few
plot-heavy episodes and the general tenor of individual episodes.
The plot-heavy episodes, I would say, are the first episode (which
has the task of introducing the first subset of the girls and
entrenching Kogarashi in his new home) and the Dragon episodes,
focused on the attempt of a “Dragon God” to kidnap and make a
bride of Yuuna. Yes, really. The first episode is structured well
enough; Kogarashi comes to the hot springs inn with its fantastically
cheap rent for a haunted room, intending to punch the offending ghost
straight to the afterlife because he is not a very good spirit medium
(Recall the point from the earlier list; the MC must be a dork of
some sort) and can only deal with supernatural things by punching
them. His demeanor softens when he actually encounters Yuuna,
finding that the ghost is a cute girl and not malicious at all. He
meets the rest of the (all-female) residents of the inn and gets the
primary notes of their personalities before having to chase off a
monk attempting to, in what appears to be an exceedingly painful
process, forcefully ascend Yuuna to her proper afterlife. The monk
comes back with an army of goons, only to have the other residents of
the inn show their stuff defending their home, revealing all their
supernatural natures to Kogarashi.
The Dragon God segment involves Yuuna
being kidnapped by aforementioned Dragon God, who intends to make her
his bride, and Kogarashi’s attempt to rescue her. It’s also the
turning point between Kogarashi being a relative normal and being an
impossible top-tier badass, since this is where we find that he can
take out, in one punch, an enemy that armies of supernatural fighters
would deem too powerful/dangerous to take on. I guess when all you
have is a hammer… The specifics aren’t really critical since it’s
still an episode plot for a Harem show that leans pretty heavily on
writing that doesn’t put the story first or possibly even third. And
when I really think about it, that’s kind of a shame, because while
the protagonist would need some work I could really see the world and
most of the other characters lending themselves to having a more
consistent arc.
Well, with regards to what actually
exists, the story is mostly nothing. So what is something? We come
to the element that harem shows – lazy or not – live or die on:
the Harem members. The main draw that a show like this is having a
ton of cute girls that viewers can enjoy watching, and providing
enough of each of them so that whether you have broad tastes or
narrow you’re being served as a fan. Are you not entertained? Is
that not why you’re watching a show like this? Different shows have
different approaches. Some try to cover their bases in fewer leading
ladies, others have a massive cast to try to make sure there’s a
‘just right’ for anyone. Some shows will treat the Harem members as
roughly equal to each other in terms of odds of moving forward or
‘winning’ while others know that some girls just have no chance and
keep them around for the fans more than for the lead. Some shows
build interest in the girls by giving them deeper opinions and
personalities when they get screen time, developing them as rounded
characters, others prefer to keep the personalities flat, and “color
inside the lines” rather than trying to extend beyond the templates
that are known to have broad appeal, deep appeal, or both.
Lazy Harem Writing 101 would dictate a
stance that’s agnostic towards numbers, but leans on the side of
favoritism (because it spares the writer from having to work out and
balance legit chemistry with every girl) and heavily on the side of
flatter, more stereotypical characters. It follows, essentially, the
first rule of entertainment: “Give the people what they want”
without really going beyond to give you something good or
interesting. Doing it this way it’s easy to crank out and easy to
digest. It won’t leave any lasting impact on the artistic medium
because it’s another remix of a song we’ve all heard before, but
people will sit through it patiently and walk away a little happier.
How does Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs hold up?
Yuuna comes down I’d say more on the
numbers side. We start with five girls in the cast and add more at
pace. It’s also heavy on the favoritism – not just for the titular
character, either; there are some pretty clear tiers when it comes to
who has a chance. The most important element, of course, is how
dimensional the characters are, and… It’s not the worst thing on
that score. Don’t get me wrong, the characters in Yuuna and the
Haunted Hot Springs are not, by in large, memorable or interesting.
I’m not going to remember their psychological complexity or emotional
struggles. But they at least have two notes apiece, motivations,
existences outside the lead character, and the ability to talk to
each other and Kogarashi like real human beings, which is more than I
can say for some shows I’ve watched.
The most important character in the harem is, of course, Yuuna. Yuuna is a cute ghost girl bound to haunt a particular location, who can’t remember the lingering regret that’s the reason why she’s a ghost. Most people can’t see her, and the main character wants to help her out in part by discovering what her lingering regret might be. Don’t worry, though – she’s not too much like Dusk Maiden of Amensia’s Yuuko Kanoe… Yuuko-san was much smarter, better written, unique, and engaging. Yuuna is a fairly flat Deredere type. She has a couple modifiers, most notably “easily flustered” but really that is it to who she is as a person. She’s kind of nice, and if she gets flustered or embarrassed her poltergeist powers will emerge and fling things around. She may be the title character of the show, but she is the least developed and least engaging of the leading harem members by far. There are a few vignettes that focus on her, but they’re all daily life sort of stuff (or that one kidnapping), not anything that actually lets us learn who she is (or was) as a person or delves into her past. The idea of finding her lingering regret is basically allowed to fall by the wayside and her main contribution to most episodes is to shriek and throw Kogarashi out of the bedroom window when she discovers she’s crawled into his bed while asleep. She’s not very charming and not very funny after a while and I’m somewhat glad the show doesn’t focus on her as much as you’d think given her presence in the title, because it would absolutely crumble if it did. She gets a few good scenes with Chisaki, one of the girls added into the cast as the show goes on, in which she does some actual emotional bonding… but in those scenes we more learn about Chisaki and how she relates, because she’s the one going through the unusual experience of communicating with a friend she can’t truly see or hear, rather than Yuuna who’s just sort of… pleasantly accommodating the difficulties.
Speaking of Chisaki, she’s probably one
of the better executed characters. She’s introduced once Kogarashi
starts going to school rather than at the beginning of the show, and
isn’t a resident of the Hot Springs Inn – she’s a normal schoolgirl
with no otherworldly nature or magical abilities. She’s also mostly
a supportive Deredere, but she does at least have a few other
personality notes to play. For one, she’s a wee bit paranoid about
men (just a touch, not so much that it really gets in the way of her
interactions with Kogarashi), and actually has a life outside of
Kogarashi himself, making friends with Yuuna directly. Honestly, one
of the most interesting things about her is that she is a normal in
this freakshow of a cast, and has to interface with the supernatural
the way a normal person would. She can’t see Yuuna or hear Yuuna’s
voice, but she is able to feel Yuuna since the latter can touch
physical objects, and can of course communicate with Yuuna through
the latter writing in a notebook (Mercifully, they don’t make
Kogarashi act as an interpreter for more than a couple lines before
hitting on this solution).
The scenes with Chisaki and Yuuna,
where the former has to come to terms with what it means to be an
insider on the supernatural and try to show human kindness to a
person she can’t detect with most of her senses are actually well
done, and feel earnest and emotional. Further, in regards to her
relationship with Kogarashi, she’s neither pointlessly shrill nor
immediately trusting nor infinitely forgiving. True, she’s seen in
compromising situations and reacts with the typical comedy reactions
as the show requires, but in a broader sense she actually has to
spend some time with Kogarashi and get to know him – when they
first meet she’s very skeptical of both his powers and his
personality, but she has a supernatural problem haunting her and is
thus in a position to go out on a limb and see what he’s capable of,
involving Kogarashi displaying a good deal of competence, kindness,
and even his more chivalrous nature. I’d say she feels like she’s
won over quite fairly.
Keeping with the good and going back to the original girls, we have Sagiri Ameno, the Tsundere Ninja with a double dose of tsun. Out of all the girls in the show I think I liked her best, not because she had a particularly unique or different persona, but because she was a decent to good execution of the classical Tsundere, a character type that can’t survive without at least some development. Because it’s required by her archetype, she gets a lot of time and attention, slowly building up her trust of Kogarashi, a process that very gradually mellows her initial harshness, leading into later interactions where she lashes out not because of anger but because she doesn’t understand or know how to deal with her feelings. The Tsundere character humor done with Sagiri, while still at least a little bit paint-by-numbers, lands better than the ecchi “Eek I’m embarrassed” humor that’s repeated with Yuuna because it’s based in character and utilizes at least some personal touches. For instance, there’s a vignette where Sagiri needs to invite Kogarashi to come along with her for swimsuit shopping (her ninja order wants her to cozy up with him after he punched out the dragon god), but what’s supposed to be a nice normal-people interaction gets silly because she can’t quite spit out the invitation right: she panics when put on the spot and makes up a ridiculous lie about a monster stalking the swimsuit shop, which Kogarashi buys hook, line, and sinker. The rest of the swimsuit shopping sequence is much funnier because the characters are having three different conversations: Kogarashi, convinced they’re really on an undercover ninja mission, Sagiri’s ninja contact trying to set the two of them up, and Sagiri herself embarrassed both by the activity and the fact that she lied and has to follow through with that.
Another brilliantly funny moment with Sagiri comes towards the end of the show; she, Kogarashi, and one of the other girls (Yaya, who I will talk about next) are studying when another girl tries to slip Kogarashi a love potion. Naturally, the dishes got scrambled and Sagiri got the potion instead, wildly intensifying her feelings for Kogarashi for a brief time. When Kogarashi needs to help her with one of her subjects and comes physically close to do so, she finds her heart pounding and butterflies in her stomach, setting up for her to act out in a lovey-dovey fashion. However, at the critical second she snaps instead and hurls him into the wall in a fit of martial arts. The subversion of the normal expectation comes out so fast that even though it’s just Kogarashi getting hit again, it can’t not be funny. The setup even works twice – the second time in short order, Sagiri has realized she’s on edge and is trying to suppress her fears, making you think that things might go the other way, only for it to swerve slapstick again in a split second. She eventually does start acting conventionally lovey-dovey, but not for long before the short-lived potion wears off leading to her hiding in her room out of shame.
I tried to ask myself why Sagiri’s
tsundere slapstick worked when Yuuna’s embarrassed poltergeist
routine falls flat more often than not. I think the key is that
Sagiri is a volatile character, and while she has her share of
running jokes (usually threatening Kogarashi with knives, an action
the show doesn’t take seriously enough to make unfunny), more of her
bits are one-off and at least not entirely expected. You know she’s
prone to lash out, but not always the exact details. And the best
physical comedy from Sagiri (not her pure character comedy, which is
also good) is a good deal faster than Yuuna’s routine. Yuuna’s
outbursts almost always begin with a several second stammer-and-blush
phase before objects (or Kogarashi) start flying, which works when
they’re going bigger but not as much when it’s the same throw we’ve
seen before. Sagiri’s outbursts don’t always come out of nowhere,
but they can, and it works better that way.
A last note for Sagiri is that, in
addition to being a well-executed slapstick Tsundere (again heavy on
the Tsun) she does actually have a couple character notes. For
instance, her status as a demon-slaying ninja leaves her
uncomfortable with expressing a feminine side. It’s not a
particularly deep character, but it does interplay with her Tsundere
antics (as it adds to the low awareness and aversion behavior that’s
part of the Tsundere recipe) and provide her something to talk about,
which is good considering that she gets significantly more time than
any of the other girls except Yuuna
Moving on we have Yaya, a cat girl who
is a cat girl and not human because she’s possessed/blessed/attended
by a giant cat spirit god. Her personality… is cat. Left to her
own devices, as she usually just sort of does cat things, mostly
involving being laconic and lazy. She doesn’t leave much of an
impression and frankly I’m not sure she left an impression on the
creators either, since (despite being one of the starting characters
and theoretically an ‘appropriate’ match for Kogarashi) she doesn’t
have a lot of focal screen time at all. She feels more like an extra
and she’s treated largely like an extra, and as such I don’t have a
ton to say about her. The few moments she does get are cute enough,
I suppose, but I’m not sure how much more there really would be to do
with her as a character in her own right.
Nonko, the busty Oni, is also a fairly
under-used character who’s in the show from the start. Unlike Yaya,
she has a decent amount of presence – when she’s actually in a
scene, it’s impossible to miss her because she’s loud and disruptive.
Perhaps because of that or perhaps because the story doesn’t seem to
treat her as a real contender for Kogarashi, she doesn’t get to be in
all that many scenes. There’s one funny sequence with her where we
learn that she’s a manga artist, and that when working in deadline
crunch time she transforms from lewd drunken slob to a ball of
agitation and anger, snapping at her characters for their stupid
decisions even as she writes them. So there’s that for Nonko.
The last ‘original’ girl of the show is Nakai Chitose, the innkeeper – a powerful deity of the home with the ability to manipulate fortune… and the body of a very little girl. She goes to middle school on the sly despite being an ancient and powerful god but could probably pass as a grade school kid instead, and is thus mercifully exempted from ecchi-related comedy and excluded from the game of affections around Kogarashi. Instead, she usually serves as the “straight man” for the comedy, or a balancing factor to bring scenes that have gone out of control back to the baseline, which is a role the show does dearly need from time to time. She does get at least one vignette, focused on that “going to school” charade, where the comedy is based largely on the fact that her ability to manipulate luck on a small scale is subject to Newton’s Third Law (“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”) and doesn’t manifest in a way she controls, lending itself to some fairly goofy setups and resolves. It’s honestly a concept that more could be done with, but probably not by a show like Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs.
Chisaki (discussed earlier) is the
first girl to be added to the group. The second, nearly coming with
her, is the tanooki girl Koyuzu. Like Nakai, she’s a loli-type and
the show isn’t interested in going there, but she does aid and abet
serving up even heavily ecchi comedy because she is obsessed with
boobs (particularly Chisaki’s), possibly because she can’t use her
magic to transform into an adult shape yet, a fact that vexes her in
her first appearance. She’s clearly something of a trickster, doing
things like brewing the love potion mentioned earlier (For someone
else; she pretty clearly just wants to see what happens) or, in her
introduction, “haunting” (peeping on) Chisaki by possessing her
stuffed animals. However, she might get even less time than Yaya so
there’s only so much she can do.
Lastly, we add in Oboro. Oboro starts
as the attendant of the Dragon God that kidnaps Yuuna, and is
obsessed with strengthening their clan, initially by making a match
between her master and one or more women with vast spiritual power.
After Kogarashi punches her boss into next week and bargains for the
release of Yuuna (and Sagiri, who got captured by Oboro while
attempting to rescue Yuuna), Oboro turns up as a new resident of the
inn. Her mission? Help provide a strong new generation for her clan
by having a child with Kogarashi. Kogarashi has no interest in
getting it on with someone he doesn’t love, and while Oboro sort of
takes no for an answer when it’s put that way, it just changes her
mission to making Kogarashi fall in love with her.
In her initial appearance, Oboro served
as a straight man for the high-energy and self-aggrandizing Dragon
God, restraining him from kidnapping just any girl who happened to
cross his path and otherwise just getting things done while he mugged
for the camera. She had a flat affect, a cold demeanor, and enough
fighting skill to pose at least a little bit of a challenge even
after her master’s defeat. As a harem member, she retains her cold
demeanor and flat affect despite being incredibly forward. Normally,
I’m not a fan of flat affect characters (I can like them, but they
have an uphill battle) since being uninterested in just about
anything usually leads to coming off as uninteresting yourself, but
Oboro at least has the weird juxtaposition of her goals (normally
something one would regard as extremely passionate) with her
dispassionate persona. It’s a gag that would probably wear out its
welcome fairly quickly, but Oboro joins late enough in the season
that she hasn’t totally exhausted her possibilities by the time we’re
done here.
So, the girls of Yuuna and the Haunted
Hot Springs are… kind of hit and miss. None of them are great
stand-alone characters, but some are decent executions and others are
poor. And really, that’s the show in a nutshell. Yuuna and the
Haunted Hot Springs is a show that lives in the bracket of lazy harem
writing – somewhere north of average for what it is, but still
there. And shows that adhere to lazy harem writing are like fast
food: they won’t nourish you, challenge you, or give you anything
complex or really worth while, but they can fill you up and satisfy a
basic part of you that doesn’t want to grow, change, or otherwise
concern itself with quality rather than contentment.
And, for the record, I don’t hate Harem
shows in abstract. Steins;Gate is brilliant, and deserves its
overall high popularity and critical praise and it’s basically a
harem show. KonoSuba is hilarious, and while it subverts some of the
expectations of the genre it really is an Isekai Harem sort of affair
all the same. And there are plenty more that can be defined as Harem
or at least have Harem elements that I’d rate decently. What I don’t
like – and even feel like I should be madder at than I am – is
laziness. The fact that there’s a formula that lets artists half-ass
their craft and still see it greedily gobbled up… but then, the
comparison to fast food stands, and really, what’s the harm? Having
shows like Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs is no more damaging to
the creative medium than the existence of McDonalds is to five-star
restaurants.
For Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs
itself, I rate the show at a C. It’s perfectly watchable, I suppose,
and there are certainly other shows that provided less in their lazy
harem writing than Yuuna did. It’s schlock and knows it, but there
are a few points that got a genuine laugh and even possibly a couple
where the show went just a hair above the call of duty. So if you
need the kind of satisfaction a mindless harem comedy will bring, I
guess I’d recommend it. Just don’t go in expecting it to be anything
else or more.