Modern bandwidth speeds means it's quite possible to upload/download video to one location while streaming video from another location. In short, I can hop on Skype and watch anime with my girlfriend despite her being five time zones away. It's helped me remember that the experience gains a lot when there are other people involved.

It also means that I'm more likely to watch some shows that ordinarily would not be on my watch list. Sometimes that turns out to be a bad thing. In this case, though, I enjoyed InuBoku significantly more than I was expecting to.

It's straight out of the "magical butler" genre - you've got a rich girl, an improbably-competent and overattentive bodyguard, shake well for romantic angst. Not ordinarily my cuppa, but Ririchiyo makes the series work. "Tsundere" isn't quite the word. She has an extremely abrasive personality and doesn't like that about herself, but was enough of a social shut-in that she never developed any other tools in her social toolbox. Fortunately, the tsun manifests as cutting remarks and not physical violence. Doesn't hurt that she's cute as a button, either.

The butler is pretty standard for this kind of show - bishounen with a dark secret in his past, etc. Rest of the cast is a fun collection of characters, not particularly deep but good enough to carry a twelve-episode comedy. The supernatural elements are, well... they're there, they factor into things, but this isn't a shounen show and it doesn't devolve into monster-of-the-week or tournament battle. Mostly it's there for the cute and to prod the plot along.

There's an exception to that, though... Ririchiyo's fiance shows up, and he's the worst kind of annoying suck-all-the-fun-out-of-the-show jerk. The episodes where he appears devolve into him verbally abusing everyone, handing out bondage implements as party favors, and espousing his philosophy that the entire world can be divided into sadism and masochism (all the way down to the damned wallpaper). It's outrageous but not funny. There are other characters in the show who have, shall we say, in-your-face personality quirks (the perverted yuki-onna bodyguard is the number one offender here), but the show doesn't go too crazy with it in one go. This guy... by the end of the show I was hoping that a freight train would crash into him.

So a decent show save for the episodes where he shows up, which is fortunately infrequently (but inconveniently, he's important to the plot, such as it is...) Still, the main character Ririchiyo carries the show, the romance is nicely realized, and there's a payoff at the end for those who put up with the one boorish guest character - no "we're not going to end it, stay tuned for the next season!" here. A romantic comedy with no goddamned harem, reverse or otherwise, an actual ending, and the world's cutest little oni? Yeah, I enjoyed it.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 375 words, total size 3 kb.