This is the is the sort of season where you take flyers on shows like Megami-ryou no Ryoubo-kun..  It’s a thin crop of prospects to say the least, and while so far I wouldn’t say the season has substantially underperformed expectations, that’s only because they were so low to begin with.  Some of those flyers have been so bad I couldn’t even make it through the premiere.  That’s not the case here (thus, the post) but I can’t be much more effusive than that.

Oneeshota (it’s just what it sounds like) is actually one of the boom genres in the doujin world of late.  In that light it’s actually surprising that there haven’t been more mainstream anime trying to cash in, given that the doujin universe is often pretty predictive of anime (and sometimes vice-versa – they generally track closely together).  But apart from Sunohara-sou (both series are based on manga) there haven’t been any that I remember in the last couple of years – unless you want to count Kobayashi-san, but it’s a pretty minor sidebar in that series.

Compared to Megami-ryou no Ryoubo-kun., Sunohara-sou was a lavish production, with a big-name director and a ton of big-time seiyuu.  Megami-ryou has no big names and a couple of complete newbies (including Yamada Misuzu as the shotagonist Koushi, and she’s actually pretty good).  It’s also bald-faced obvious about what it is, literally right from the opening frame.  This is soft-care hentai, porn with everything but the actual sex.  The point here is to get the shota into compromising positions with the delinquents at the Goddess’ Dormitory for problem girls as often and as graphically as possible.  And interestingly, the TV version (airing on AT-X) doesn’t appear to be censored.

Anything resembling plot here is basically pretext to make the above happen.  And the pretext is that Koushi is homeless and starving after his house burns down and his deadbeat dad skips town, and the senior student at the dorm, Mineru, takes pity on him and decides to make him the “dorm mother”.  Think Sunoharasou where the shota is the landlady, with even less shame.  If there’s a twist here it’s that one of the girls, Atena (who also has a huge phobia about males) repeatedly remarks on just how wrong it is for a bunch of college girls to be wrapping themselves all over a first-year middle-schooler and scolds them to stop it.  They don’t.

As these sorts of things go, Megami-ryou no Ryoubo-kun. isn’t terrible.  It looks okay, the cast is actually pretty adequate, and Koushi is a reasonably winning lead.  And there are worse things than an ecchi series having no pretensions about what it is – it’s honest at least.  Whether one of the characters recognizing just how wrong the premise is makes it any less wrong I’m not sure, but let’s be honest – it’s no wronger (it’s actually a word, look it up) with manga or anime than it is with doujins, and I don’t see anyone arguing that Comiket should get shut down.  As I said about Comiket years ago, Japanese pop culture is a choose your own adventure book for fetishes, and there are plenty of more important things to get upset about in this world.