An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Putting the Hentai in Sentai – Super Hxeros Spoiler Review

So, if you thought the plot for last week’s entry sounded like an overly complicated excuse for porn, get a load of Super Hxeros: In a world assailed by aliens trying to wipe humanity out by draining people of erotic energy, it’s up to a group of teenagers to be horny enough to get super powers and fight back!

In other words, it’s pretty much the same pitch but with a sentai flair rather than battle school. And, okay, I’ve been surprised by what sound like terrible pitches in the past. How’s this one do?

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Make Out For the Sake of All Mankind – Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia

Someone seriously asked the question “What if we had Infinite Stratos but the super suits are literally powered by arousal?”. That idea got greenlit for real. And you might think, “Well, that sounds like a sorry excuse for a Hentai, but what isn’t?” I regret to inform you that I do not review Hentai. This thing actually thinks someone is going to take it seriously. Does it work? We’ll see.

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Zero to Hero(ine) – Ga-Rei-Zero Spoiler Review

You know it, you love to see it: a world where it’s the modern day except secret ghosts and ghouls menace reality and are fought off by equally secret heroes. It’s the urban fantasy masquerade action classic formula. It’s Ga-Rei-Zero.

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In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there are Little Girls – Black Bullet Spoiler Review

Well, if an idea isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Instead, remix it! Here we have a very classic and functional idea, a world where humanity is on the brink of ruin because of some unforeseeable mythical disaster or alien invasion. We also have the scenario where little girls are the badass fighters of the hour, beholden to their adult handlers, which seems to be my theme for the time being.

But again, when something works, it works. There’s no reason these elements shouldn’t go together like peanut butter and jelly, with supernatural powers to excuse the fighting girls and gribbly enemies to provide fearsome foes. It still takes care and skill to execute that sort of vision, but going in from frame 1 it’s certainly possible.

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Once More With Schoolgirl Assassins – Lycoris Recoil Spoiler Review

Almost two whole decades after the original Gunslinger Girl, along came a show that took the anime-viewing world by storm with basically the same pitch: In the ambiguously near future, a world government secretly maintains order in society by using specially trained minor girls to do their wetwork.

It’s hard to talk about Lycoris Recoil without addressing the kind of hype this show had. Frankly, around the peak of its popularity, it was the kind of reception that no actual show is going to quite live up to, not even an extremely good one. How far short of that unreachable mark such a show falls… is another story entirely.

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