A disappointing end.
We have now reached the final episode and unfortunately it doesn’t deliver anything new just the same stuff we saw in almost every episode. Let’s just get this disappointment over with and hope future male oriented r18 shows are handled better than this was by not altering the source material unless you are adding content or scenes not removing them.
After the previous episode Mei brings both of them back to the room after they passed out. Aoi has awaken and Mei leaves her to take care of Souta while she leaves to yell at the boys who were caught spying on the girls in the previous episode.
Mei and Takazuki yell at the boys that were caught as the two of them leave. This scene could had resulted in some nice things but of course doesn’t because that would make too much sense for this show. When I first saw the two of them together I was hoping what should by all accounts happen for porn with a story like this would had happened but doesn’t. Takazuki is an original character that ultimately didn’t really have a purpose other than for the sake of having another male that shows interest in Aoi. In other words a parallel version of Mei but aimed at the main girl instead of the main guy. Since they removed Mei’s scene with Souta early on and this character exists to be a male equivalent of Mei what better way to fix that anime original change than to give an anime original scene with the two of them and thus give purpose for this anime original character’s existence and reason for removing the Mei scene.
It would make perfect sense because the same thing that happened here is something you see happen in hentai plenty of times. A character realizes they will never have the person they wanted while another character suffers the same way with both of them having had interest in the two people that ended up together instead of with them. So as a result the two of them seek comfort in each other and end up together instead through their grief. So it would had made perfect sense to give them a scene since Takazuki lost Aoi to Souta and Mei lost Souta to Aoi. You could have had two sex scenes going on at the same time with one between Aoi and Souta and a second with Mei and Takazuki in another room. But that makes way too much sense. A competent director would had realized this perfect setup and would had used said setup to justify their altering of the source material but this show sadly did not have a competent director.
While Aoi is watching over a passed out Souta she starts to talk about why she first got attracted to him unaware that he is really awake and pretending to be passed out still. She tells him she was always seeing him try his hardest in volleyball even when he was the only one with strength left and how she would always see him training even outside of school and became attracted to that. She mentions how she wanted to give up on volleyball as she had a hard time at it but she would always think about him and how hard he was always trying as a way of cheering herself up and giving herself motivation to continue. She tells him if it hadn’t been for him she never would had gotten as far in the sport as she did.
Souta after hearing all of this now knows the truth and decides to show her he was awake listening the whole time by kissing her as she leans over. This then leads to the final sex scene in the show.
So an interesting thing here. I didn’t notice this initially when watching this episode and didn’t see it till I was going frame by frame to make a stitch of this part. Looks like whoever was in charge of the mosaics messed up and moved it to the left too much instead. Would be nice if some of the other shows airing this season would have a censorship mistake like this instead and give nipples instead of waiting for the BD. Considering the director’s previous r18 show he clearly loves penis so there is your explanation I guess.
After finishing up Souta decides now would be the best time for him to confess to Aoi as well. Just as he is about to tell her he loves her they get interrupted by his phone ringing. Aoi laughs at him telling him neither of them can ever tell the other what they want for one reason or another and with that the show ends.
Long final thoughts time like all my last episode posts. This was our second male aimed r18 show but if you had told me it was a josei instead I would almost believe you since other than the character designs not being josei like there was little other setting this apart from them. Obviously the big issue I have with the show is removing the Mei scene which I suspect others were pissed about as well but there is more to it than just missing out on that scene. Removing it put this show on the same level of the josei ones by not containing the main thing that would set it apart from previous josei shows which is multiple females getting scenes. We got one foreplay scene with a second girl and that was it and considering the josei shows did a similar thing by giving the the main girl in those a foreplay scene with another guy in some cases but not going all the way it’s the same issue but in reverse. The director’s previous experience was Skirt, that prison one, and the yaoi one from last season so the guy only had directed porn for women before and yet for some inane reason they decided to give him one aimed at straight males and he treated it like he was making it for women. When your previous job was directing men in anime fucking each other in the ass you shouldn’t be touching something aimed at straight males. The only reason I could see for why the Mei scene was removed was to make the story more romantic or something by making it that Souta and Aoi lost their virginity to each other and he only had sex with her. In other words the stuff we saw in those josei titles most of the time and that is where the problem with this adaption begins.
I will put it this way I don’t watch porn for some kind of serious romance story. Women do hence the existence of josei but porn for men doesn’t need to focus on feelings or romance. If you want to add it in that is fine but it should not result in locking certain content out from happening as ultimately we watch porn to fap not get a serious relationship story. This is especially true when the work is only 5 minutes long thus making any attempt at romance feel half assed anyway. Porn and non porn shows are two different things and certain things not acceptable in one isn’t the case for the other and should not apply to it as a result such as for example the morality of characters. In a normal anime if the main guy is fucking a bunch of different women than people probably will think negatively about him especially if we are supposed to believe some kind of romance plot point. But for porn that goes out the window. I and assumingly most others give zero shit about characters acting morally in porn. A main guy fucking multiple different women in porn is a non issue since porn isn’t supposed be taken seriously. Even anime could get away with this if they wanted as long as it was a comedy that didn’t take relationships seriously either. In other words restricting the main guy to one woman alone is a stupid decision for porn aimed at males as we don’t give a shit if he is fucking other women left and right as we know the difference between reality and fiction and porn should be escapism from reality.
So the decision to remove Mei’s seen in order to make the romance more serious was pointless as I doubt any of us watching this care about the romance we just want to see women fucked since this is porn after all. The director apparently couldn’t grasp this concept and treated this like another one of his girl porn shows he did. What makes this worse is that if you removed this for narrative purposes that is contradictory as well as removing it hurts the narrative. By removing the scene it removed Souta’s internal struggle of knowing he has two girls in love with him and how he has difficulty figuring who to go for since he had sex with Mei. Also removing it ruins Mei’s character development as well as her having sex with him made her interest in him make more sense let alone she acknowledges that Aoi likes him as well but still wanted to do it anyway giving her an inner struggle as well. So removing the scene to not ruin the “romance” aspect still manages to ruin the story in another way. Then to make matters worse there still was a way to keep the scene in and not “ruin” the romance as well.
I have said it before in other posts but this is the beauty of imagination scenes. It allows you to have content happen that would normally mess with the story. So there was no excuse to not simply change Mei’s scene to an imagination one if the director was so worried about the romance part. Simply have the scene happen like it is supposed to only to end with a flash and show the main guy looking at her body and thinking to himself how he wishes he could do that. There you go we get the scene and the useless romance is still untainted. In the end this show didn’t really feel much different from the josei ones since despite having two girls heavily marketed they went against the source and made it that only one got any sex scenes. The only thing that really set this apart from the josei titles and the only thing that this had different from joshi ochi was the significant number of other girls getting nude.
We got nudity of a bunch of different background girls and though in theory this is a nice thing the problem is it’s not really something deserving of too much praise when you consider what this is which is porn. Nudity of multiple characters is nice in normal anime since that is the most you expect from them so you can’t fault them for nothing more since you have no reason to expect more. But this isn’t a normal anime it’s porn and I don’t watch porn to see girls standing around naked and doing nothing else I watch porn to see girls getting fucked. So though the different nudity set this a bit apart from the others it’s not really something worth many points considering it really functions as a cock tease when it’s in porn. Here are all these good looking girls but you won’t see them getting fucked you only get this one girl instead. In the case of the background girls that didn’t happen in the source unlike Mei but that doesn’t make it any less dumb. When you make porn any girl in it that isn’t getting fucked feels like a waste since this is porn after all and that is why you watch it.
We really need a male aimed r18 show that doesn’t care about story and embraces the porn aspect of it. Would like to see something that has a different girl fucked each episode to keep things fresh. The real annoyance is the existence of an all ages version means they always need to have 3 minutes and 30 second of content for that which leaves them limited on the r18 content. If they would just stop making an all ages version then we could get more time per episode spent on the main reason we watch. In conclusion though this one failed to even reach the status of joshi ochi last summer and I would actually not even rank this as number 2 of the r18 shows either. What few good things it did were negated by stupid choices so it was the whole one step forward two steps back thing. At least in the case of the josei ones we knew to expect only one girl and nothing else as that was what happened in the source material. But for this not only did they market it with two girls front and center but the source material had both girls getting fucked yet the show removes one of them and thus goes against what everyone had reasonable expectations of happening.
I would put Joshi Ochi > Omiai > Araiya > Souryo > Skirt > 25sai. I never covered amai or capsule hotel as I grew sick of josei titles being the same thing every time and stopped those. So I would rank this as number 3 and even that is debatable as I almost want to put Souryo above that as it had novelty of being the first r18 show and not having the frustration that Araiya had. Hopefully when we get the next male r18 show it follows the same pattern of quality that the josei ones did. For those we had Souryo by seven which was the first then Skirt by this studio which felt like a downgrade compared to Souryo then finally it went back to seven with Omiai which I consider the best of the josei ones. So maybe the same logic will happen here and after having joshi ochi by Ark first and then this by magic bus which was a downgrade maybe next will go back to Ark and give us the greatest male r18 show so far. Alternatively get Seven to come back and let them have a try at a male aimed one especially since we see them make hentai all the time.
As for the next show it sadly looks like it will be another josei. The official announcement came out earlier this morning and when they first hinted at it last week I was able to figure out what manga it was based on a few clues and looked at it in advance and saw that it was indeed a josei and we now have confirmation that is the one getting adapted next. The odd thing though is that the show has multiple men and women in it from what they are showing but that isn’t what I saw when looking through some pics of the manga on various blogs prior. So either they are adding characters to it and thus will have multiple couples and multiple different scenes as a result or all of these but the main leads will just be background characters. Will have to wait and see but that will determine if I cover it or not because I don’t want to bother with a josei featuring the same two characters each time. So depending on how that goes will determine if I do posts on it during the summer or not. Once a pv comes out we can see just what we may be getting and hope it’s better than this one was. Also I made the joke last episode but I autisticly rant too much about porn holy fuck.
As someone that hates tsunderes this could had been a lot better if it had consisted of the tsundere getting cucked. Seriously I would had loved the show if it had the main guy go for the more nicer and kinder girl instead. That is what needs to happen more often and have tsunderes be subjected to NTR. It would serve as good political commentary by showing that women that are abusive get left forever alone like they deserve while the caring girls win instead.
