I Tried Watching An Anime For The First Time: It Did Not Go Well

Okay, so that headline is a bit of a lie. As a guy who grew up in the early 2000’s, I watched the hell out of Dragon Ball Z. I mean, what else at the time did people our age have to watch that had that much punching? 7-12 year old Blake lived and breathed DBZ. He owned every episode on DVD and maybe 4 or 5 PS2 games where he could relive all of Goku’s finest punches. However, that love I had for the Dragon Ball franchise did not extend for the rest of anime. I hated it. Every. Single. One. Naruto took the brunt of my hate. I remember getting into arguments with my friends over who would win in a fight between Goku and the kid from Naruto (I assume that’s the main characters name). My anger grew from the stubborn insistence that a blonde kid with a cat face could beat Goku and a shifting set on interests. I came to an age where any and all animation (barring “dirty” cartoons like South Park or Simpsons) was childish. The manifestation of an unhealthy obsession with action movies that’s still in me to this day didn’t help either. While I grew out of that notion when I finally came to an age where embarrassment more or less disappeared, Anime wasn’t included with the rest of the medium. My disdain wasn’t because of how it was made, it was the genre itself. Anime was bizarre, exposition heavy, and sexist. I tried, believe me. But not matter what I watched, there would always be a premise too strange or something on screen would start to resemble an orifice. But now, I’m giving it another shot. And in an effort to prove how serious I am about this, I picked the weirdest, weebiest show I could find. And oh my God, what did I just subject myself to? [caption id="attachment_257346" align="alignleft" width="430"] This. I watched this. God forgive me.[/caption] Monster Musume: Everyday Life with Monster Girls, comes from one of the deepest, darkest holes of any fandom. I didn’t want to watch something more vanilla or Americanized for this. After lots of googling and consultation with a couple weeb friends, I was pointed in this direction. Monster Musume is a show about a fairly normal Japanese dude named Kimihito and his experiences being  a chaperone of sorts for a species of human/monster hybrid girls. It is without question, the horniest thing I’ve ever seen. [caption id="attachment_257343" align="alignright" width="457"] The title characters of Monster Musume. [/caption] Where Monster Musume really takes a bold step is the design of its title characters. Snake girls, bird girls, centaurs, viscous liquid girls, BDSM spider girls, and more. They all have fairly different looks, but they also all share one thing in common. The animators here really wanted to make them aich-ay-dubya-tee HAWT. Beneath the scales, spines, or feathers, these are some truly bodacious ladies. There are not one, but two credit sequences detailing the adventure of these monster girls, often showing the clothes exploding right off of the human parts of their bodies. Take Miia the snake for instance (more on her below). Apart from her lower body being that of a massive snake monster, she’s also got unnaturally large breasts; and despite most of her body being in the form of a serpentine tail, Miia somehow has a window in her tail that previews a heaping swath of butt crack. A butt crack window, so to speak. The show really goes out of its way to let us know that all of this has sex appeal. One character even gives an aside to the audience to remind us that Miia has boobs, and is therefore irresistible. In the land of Monster Musume, relations between humans and the monster people (persons?) is pretty tense. They’re just now letting the monster people into Japan, and there are certain rules for both species. Namely, no sex or any kind of non-plutonic relations. Enter Miia (her name has two i’s, because that’s sexier?), she’s a fairly normal young woman, barring the whole thing where she’s a giant snake monster from the waist down. She’s the first monster person to come to live in Japan, and Kimihito has been chosen to be her host. In preparing for her, he makes his house bigger to accommodate for the giant snake half of Miia. But Miia’s size is the least of his problems. Because, put on some  Barry White and a band of snake people, Miia is one seductive snake lady. And strong. Really, really strong. [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="540"] If this horror has to be burnt into my head, then it has to be in yours too. [/caption] The series opens with Kim waking up in bed to find Miia wrapped around him like a boa constrictor. She needed to keep warm, you know, because she’s a snake. And snakes are cold blooded. To escape from this throttling, Kim begins to uh… stimulate Miia by stroking her tail. The whole thing is like this pretty much all the time. She pulls the poor dude into bath tubs and dressing rooms with her. There’s also a government agent that’s always around to keep an eye on Kim and Miia, and also to encourage him to copulate with our charming snake lady while  reminding him that doing so will result in Miia being deported and a prison sentence for himself. A snake person hating government isn’t the only obstacle blocking Kim and Miia’s blossoming romance, as the general public seems to bear a certain amount of disdain for these hybrid creatures. In their journey about town, the pair keep bumping into an obnoxious Owen Wilson lookalike and his girlfriend. Owen and his lady repeatedly mock Miia in their run ins, culminating in Kim charging up to do a Falcon Punch that sends the hateful couple through a window. Another funny thing about Kim, whenever he's frustrated (either the sexual kind of frustration or the regular kind), he gets a nosebleed that geysers like Old Faithful. I have since been told that this is common place in Anime. I’d like to think that this show isn’t a good representation of the entire medium, but that being said, it’s put me off trying this anime again for a very long time. It might just not be for me. I could try to reason with myself that there’s more to this show than what I saw in the first episode. Maybe use some twisting logic to say that it’s a sort of self-parody of the genre or that it has a positive message about accepting those who are different than us. But that would be giving this, bizarre and horrific thing far more credit than it’s due. Frankly, I think Monster Musume:  Everyday Life with Monster Girls is the scribblings of a deranged zoophilic. I pray to whatever God is listening that someone keeps him or her away from any animals. Anyway, it’s on Hulu if anyone wants to watch it.