ShitsuMonDay: Whoooooa, We're Halfway There

息子さんは中三で、受験勉強してた（してた）

Her son's a third-grader in middle school and was studying for exams.
夜食のカップヌードル、お母さんが忘れた（忘れた）

The late-night Cup Noodle, his mother forgot it.
息子さんはーーーすねた

The son...threw a hissy-fit.

Bon Jovi knows a good product from Japan when he sees one. Do you?

We're hitting you with this week's ShitsuMon. With the season halfway over, the breaking point has been reached. By now, it's all or nothing—if you haven't dropped some of the awful shows out there from your viewing schedule, you're stuck with watching them all season long. No matter how much you try not to, you're watching for the bad shows to flame out in a "Blaze of Glory", but you're also wise to know which shows are about as bad as EdTV.

So here's the ShitsuMon for Monday: what train crash of a series have you been unable to peel your eyes away from this season, due to the sheer love of Bad Medicine?

My choices after the break.

1. Astarotte's Toy (Crunchyroll)

There's just too much of this show that's going wrong to pull my eyes away from it. From the total miscasting of Rina Satô (Mikoto Misaka, A Certain Scientific Railgun) as the 23-year-old "male lead" Naoya to the skin-crawling knowledge that his daughter Asuha is 10 and wears no panties, there shouldn't be any good reason to watch the show. I mean, Naoya was seduced by a succubus and is now a member of the harem of her daughter Astarotte, who is the same age as Asuha. There is plenty to be worried about with this show, but so far the show is painted in so many pastels (too many for a land inhabited by "monsters") that it's meant to be mindless.

I'm so thoroughly worried about the family tree here, and I would be surprised if it was discovered that Astarotte's his kid too. That would still make me watch Astarotte's Toy, but I might do it with blinders.


2. Softenni

A reminder to all anime fans: this is a show about 14-year-olds playing "soft tennis" with a 28-year-old male instructor who appears hungover at the first practice, and let's not forget the fact that some of the girls have a crush on the instructor. There are panty-shots and nude scenes blotted out by animal stickers, regular speech creepily perverted into sexcapades by the bubblegum-haired Asuna, and a cross-dressing male manager whose massages can induce orgasms. If you were expecting some sort of Prince of Tennis/Azumanga Daioh crossover, you're not getting one.


Will the shark be jumped in this show? Doubtful. The gluttonous Chitose would just strip, charge at it with a harpoon, and roast it over a spit.


3. Battle Girls: Time Paradox (Crunchyroll)

This show is getting to me in the same manner that Hyakka Ryôran Samurai Girls got to me. The show is sugarcoating the dangerous Warring States period so much that I'm expecting a limited-edition cereal to come from this promotion. Instead of wars, the show figures that it would be better for territories and treasures to be decided through competition and recreation. (Yeah, I know I shot down Dog Days for turning war into Wipeout, but at least Battle Girls is trying to keep some semblance of war in the early stages of the show.) Couple that with an ending theme that basically strips them bare, and you really have a nonsense show that makes the next stage—a show about the architects of the Meiji Era depicted as Akihabara maid-cafe employees—not all too implausible.


I'll probably lose interest in the show soon enough, but right now it's doing what a show based on a pachi-slot game is supposed to do—lay on the cheesecake until your cholesterol maxes out.