Well, it’s Feburary, and because this month contains a holiday certain cultures associate with love and sexuality, I end up slotting it full of reviews of shows that have similar topics. This year, I’ve done heavy ecchi and pervy romance, so clearly I’m going for the twisted end of the spectrum. So, what better topic to continue the month with than Incest?
Incest and incest plots tend to be a pretty touchy subject. For one, different cultures have different mores on the topic. Most mainstreams would tend to agree that full siblings are off-limits (to say nothing of the issues around parent-child relations), but half siblings, or especially cousins or step-siblings? That’s a much fuzzier matter on which different populations might disagree without even realizing it.
Whether some core divergence is the reason or not, you tend to see more of that sort of thing in Anime than you would in Western media, at least when looked at in a less than totally repulsive light. A sibling with a crush is usually not taken seriously because the younger of the two will be depicted as very childish, but I don’t think that joke goes over half as well to state-side audiences as its frequency would suggest it might in its home culture. And beyond that, you do get romances founded on the concept. In a show like Nakaimo or Onegai, Twins! siblinghood is treated as a pretty bad thing for romance, but there’s also some allure, of the taboo or otherwise, that’s being tapped into.
I could probably go long about comparative cultures and what various incest or incest-adjacent plots might be tapping into in order to create appeal, but I’m going to assume you all want to see a review of flagrant “incest” romance Kiss x Sis rather than thousands of words of essay tangentially related to it, so I’ll get to the topic at hand.
Kiss x Sis stars Keita, our milquetoast average schoolboy, whose life includes his elder twin sisters Riko (The ditzy, obvious one) and Ako (the more serious, well-adjusted one), who are both clearly hot for little brother. Well, clearly to everyone but him at least. I’m just going to get this out of the way at the start: they’re step-siblings, not at all related by blood. They’ve clearly been a family for some time, but the parents seem all for the ship of the next generation down, meaning that Keita is alone in being at all against it… not that he doesn’t have horny fantasies of his hot sisters on the brain often enough as it is.
The heart of the show is that while there is clearly a great deal of sexual tension in the house, all three kid-generation family members do absolutely and non-psychotically care for each other very deeply, lust aside. This is set up decently well in the first episode where, after making the PG-13 most of the parents being out for the night (the sisters curling up with Keita while he sleeps), they find that absent mom and dad is a bigger problem for little brother than he let on, when they discover a crumpled summons to a parent-teacher conference for that day, which the parents will still be too out of town to attend. They visit Keita’s school (the sisters are first year high school, Keita is third year middle school) and that causes a ruckus because they’re mobbed by their adoring fans, every boy in school. Keita breaks it up and chews them out for coming around, he presumes for flippant reasons, when they should know this kind of thing is going to happen. But, as they prepare to leave, one of them drops the crumpled summons, Keita finds it, and he realizes they had an earnest and serious reason they wanted to actually help him (standing in for his parents, I guess) and apologizes.
The main conflict in the show essentially boils down to the fact that the sisters want Keita to succeed at school, especially so he can go to the same high school they do, and are also hot for him. This leads to tutoring and studying being a major part of the setups, such as Ako (still intensely forward even if I called her well-adjusted) getting Keita to remember facts by, after some trial and error regarding her overly horny teaching methods, writing them on interesting parts of her anatomy to sear the ideas into Keita’s brain.
That gets her pretty far, but eventually Keita has had enough of the scenario, and it’s Riko’s turn to get some near-action in, courtesy of chocolate lipstick and setting stupid Home Alone traps to keep Ako busy. The exchanges prove that the goal of the sisters (seducing Keita) will probably be pretty easy in the grand scheme of things.
What follows after setting those expectations is… mostly slice of life centered around Keita’s efforts to study and Ako and Riko’s efforts to both be good big sisters and get into Keita’s pants. There is other material, but its largely irrelevant and easily forgotten. There are three male friends of Keita. They’re set dressing. There’s a female kouhai with a crush on him. She’s totally irrelevant. There’s her older sister, who is a teacher at the high school Ako and Riko attend. She’s… at least amusing, being a poorly closeted otaku. There’s a female classmate of Keita’s that hijinks keep happening with. Honestly I started to dread seeing her on screen because she was a vehicle for the show’s worst moments and setups, but that doesn’t mean she was actually anything more than a distraction.
Eventually, the exam comes, and the announcement of results gets its own episode with zero steamy scenes (otherwise a staple, more on that later) or bathroom humor (the other alternative), treated entirely as a Slice of Life drama when the siblings encounter a lot of bad omens on their way to check the results, and at first it looks like Keita didn’t pass. They’re all three devastated, Keita especially, but talk out their problems as a family and decide to make the best of the immediate situation, enjoying the after-party that the sisters meticulously prepared anyway, as Keita promises to try hard to get in next year.
Of course, it turns out he passed the test just fine, but ended up on the wait list (which he seems to reasonably expect means getting in, and which the scatterbrained otaku teacher failed to post properly). Cheers all around. That’s the penultimate episode though. The plot resolved, the show decides it needs to go out on a “high” note by faffing about with his middle school graduation, getting in some very standard ecchi comedy followed by the sisters attempting to (but pulling back from) having a little threesome with a Keita too drunk to wake up for it due to having accidentally grabbed his dad’s glass at dinner. I guess the decision to not go through with it is framed as sweet enough and the shots of the beginning of high school life are a fine sendoff, but there really isn’t much to it.
And that’s basically the show: there really isn’t much to it. Before I actually let it go, though, I have to give some notes.
First, the ecchi. The ecchi is this weird and heterogeneous mix where the show largely stays comfortably in the PG-13 bracket of harmlessness. But when it really wants to turn up the heat, the animation and sound design get all the effort that the rest of the show lacks in order to really turn up that heat. Despite there being no uncensored nudity and very few scenes that require any form of active censoring, the kissing and touching in this show can get a lot spicier than anything in Super Hxeros, which was rife with disrobed individuals that were supposed to be in erotic situations. A friend of mine described this show as a Hentai that got a last minute note that they needed to also be a heartwarming slice of life comedy, and I’ll concur with that assessment of the material.
Because there is a curious balance to it. For every scene where the sisters are going excessively erotic, there’s another scene that shows their care in a serious, earnest, and non-psychotic form. I do think that’s supposed to be the attraction of the “sister” aspect, even more than the allure of the taboo: they love their mark in more ways than one, and thus one could argue more completely.
Similarly, the show mostly keeps to fairly vanilla stuff… mostly. There are, however, a couple land-mine vignettes (or episodes) that go for the gutter. And like they pull out all the stops when they actually want a scene to be hot, they have no filter at all when they want a scenario to be crude. The gross-out moments in Kiss x Sis (mostly courtesy of that classmate I mentioned and her volatile bladder) are uncommon, but they are as overwhelmingly flagrant and straightforwardly what they are as the siscon angle: the show makes no attempt to play coy with the matter, disguise what it’s doing, or avert anything about it.
In a sense, that might underly Kiss x Sis’s greatest strength: it’s a very honest show. It’s about a boy and his twin (step)sisters who love him very much – as family, romantically, and sexually. It basically tells you as much in the title and it delivers everything to do with that, with little in the way of accessories and nothing attempting to veil or defuse the situation. Whether the result is a good show or not, at least it’s not trying to trick you or lead you on or anything like that, and I can respect that.
That said, the result is not a good show. Even if you get past the concept, even if you’re attracted by the concept, it doesn’t have a lot of meat to it. By the end of something like episode 3 you know who Ako and Riko are, what they’re up to, and that Keita’s surface-level resistance isn’t really rejection. You know he’s studying for the high school entrance exams and… that’s all the plot there is to it. This isn’t like Flying Witch where each new episode can show you something weird and magical, it’s got to show you the same stuff with no real room for progression. I think that’s why they segued into the lower deck cast and the toilet humor; they really didn’t have enough material to fill up twelve episodes with just sisterly seduction study schemes.
At the same time… that’s kind of Slice of Life sometimes, isn’t it? If you took out the siscon aspect and said “This is a show about a boy trying to study for the exams to get into the high school he wants to” it would feel like a real pitch and no doubt the show would be just as light. Because that’s the angle we’re taking, there’s only so much I can count it against Kiss x Sis.
That said, there is plenty I can count against Kiss x Sis. The animation is unbelievably cheap. The characters are pretty flat and usually generic. The scenarios, while sometimes delivering something worth appreciation, are largely lack-luster, and one or two hurt me in the way that only a reviewer who is obligated to sit through this stuff can be hurt.
I think the most comparable show that I’ve previously reviewed would be DearS. Cheap animation? Check. Uncomfortable fetish material? Check. Can’t go all the way because it’s extremely technically family friendly? Check (Don’t watch either of these shows with “family”, please.). Kiss x Sis is, on the whole, a little better than DearS. It has more earnest moments that work and more jokes that land on the whole. It lacks the plot, but again it’s just a different genre. No character is quite as standout as Miu, but the baseline of Ako, Riko, and Keita is a good deal higher than that of Takeya and Ren.
Thus, I’ll be awarding Kiss x Sis a slightly higher grade than I did DearS: D. Same bracket, but Kiss x Sis shaves off the minus. I still wouldn’t recommend it, but do with that what you will.