Takopi's Original Sin

This anime was a disappointment. Not only did it get showered with praise, but it also seems like the type of thing I like. You've got children suffering, deceptive naivete, cute alien figures that do not understand humans but meddle in our affairs and make it worse, complex family dynamics... But it all seemed so cheap and engineered in the end.

Takopi is a cute octopus like alien that comes from planet Happy, a place where there's quite literally nothing negative as he is uncapable of understanding negative emotions. He arrives on Earth and meets a girl that is anything but happy, and tries to fix that with his Doraemon style gadgets. Endless suffering ensues.

I don't know where to begin, I was frustrated by a lot of things. Let's begin with the superficial stuff. The art.. The animation was amazing. It really was. I was also really fond of the artstyle at first, but it got exhausting really quickly. All of the characters, literally all, do this stupid one eye half winking expression, all. the. time. Happy? Sad? Confused? Angry? Grieving? Scared? Doesn't matter! THEY ALL HAVE THAT STUPID FUCKING FACE ON THEIR FACE! It seems to be the artist's signature thing, but all I can see is Nagatoro's smug face. It's that stupid, cheesy bully expression and it actually impacted my enjoyment lmao. Not just that, but this manga also suffers from that nu-anime trope I don't like, which is weird random sparkly symbols inside eyes to represent feelings, which I already complained about back when I watched the first season of Oshii no ko. I realize I'm the only person in the world to complain about that though LMAO. Like I know sparkly tears are NOT a new thing and usually I love the melodrama it brings, yet I'm autistically bothered by them in this new style, I really can't elaborate why.

The OST was nice, but I didn't like how it got utilized at times. I really don't like songs with lyrics being used when characters are speaking, and it was done multiple times. It doesn't bother me when it's the opening/ending being used in the last episode, or like halfway in to represent an emotional climax, but not random ost song #4 being used in episode 1 and 3 lmfao.

Portraying broken families full of abuse is a delicate thing. It's very easy to descend into some kind of misery porn territory. To be frank, I'm no stranger to enjoying misery porn here or there, but I feel like it's got to come from the author's heart in some way. There has to be some proper pure edge in there, otherwise it feels wrong. This anime feels bait-y. Something about the families and the abuse being suffered, it's too clean and clinical feeling, the abusive parents are too perfectly cruel, all of them being hateable. I was also frustrated by the lack of intervention from anyone's part. If I suspend my disbelief and buy that all of the adults are so useless to a ridiculous degree, we still have the issue with Naoki's brother. Somehow, Junya is perfectly oblivious to his mom abusing his younger brother and is completely incapable of ever intervening until the climax in Naoki's arc when he finally tells him they're brothers and he loves him yadda yadda. Somehow you'd think a perfect brother such as him would be there more for his little brother that didn't get hugged by their mom for multiple years. I'm saying this from a pov of an older sister that noticed even the slightest mistreatment my sister would receive from anyone, it's really not that hard to notice and intervene (and I'm relying on Junya's characterization here of him being literally perfect, if he was more mindless and clueless it would make more sense). I hate these stories where everyone is oblivious all the fucking time, it makes everything so artificial and fake for the purpose of moving the story somewhere.

Takopi seemed like the perfect opportunity for an Innocent Creature With Good Intentions Unintentionally Wreaks Havoc story, but a few episodes in and Takopi's shtick started bothering me too. Even after he got his memories (which, don't even talk to me about that section of the anime - it ended up feeling so unecessary???), he remained oblivious and repetitive and needed Naoki to spell things out for him, shoutout to Naoki, the only character with a functioning brain in the whole story. In that moment I had hoped we would finally get some character development for Takopi, because he seems to have picked up on Shizuka's sociopathic emotional manipulation by begging Naoki to stay in a very similar manner to Shizuka, yet the anime never touched upon it further. I was really hoping he'd either sponge up all of the abuse done to him by children and adults around him and that he'd grossly misunderstand things even more, or that he'd come to a realization that humans are just fucked, yet NONE of these things happened. Because nothing Takopi witnessed actually like affected him in any way, he's still as alien as he was to all of this as he was in the beginning. Literally 0 development, Takopi remained as pure as he was in the beginning, sacrificing himself at the end in a really dumb way, completely out of nowhere. There was a serious lack of introspection that could've made this anime more interesting. And in the end we get a total deus ex machina. Clap clap, the end. Yawn...

The one character I do want to give props for at times is Shizuka, and her creepy descent into emotional manipulation. She was properly fucked up and the glimpses we got of this were really captivating (until it got ridiculous in Tokyo tbf), but I think the shortness of the story is a big detriment here. I refuse to believe that the ending somehow magically cured her being fucked in this way. No. It's not that simple.

Despite the superficial focus on inherited trauma and the cycle of abuse, we didn't dwell on this too much. We also didn't end up with a proper catharsis imo, I at least felt disappointed by the deus ex machina. The set up in episode 2 clearly pointed us in one direction, which was then trampled on by the ending.

If everyone has a little bit of good and a little bit of evil in them, then why are all of the adults in this show really, astoundingly, retarded - all of the time? Checkmate, atheists.