Saikano

I'll be spoiling the whole plot pretty much, so if you're interested in watching/reading this without spoilers, don't read past like... 3rd paragraph

Saikano, or Saishuu Heiki Kanojo, or She, The Ultimate Weapon is an anime/manga you saw in lots of weeby online corners if you were online in the early 2000s. It has a very certain je ne sais quoi that appeals to otakus and edgy teenage girls alike, so by no surprise at all it seems to have re-emerged as a fan favorite among animecore y2k heisei era retro insertbuzzwordhere larpers that were born at least 5 years after the anime came out lmao.

The manga in particular is to be thanked for many a weeby wallpapers back in the day, and I think just about anyone is familiar with this picture...

Saikano's reception is a mixed bag online, a surprising amount of people worship it for what I can only hope are purely aesthetic reasons so they pretend to like the story/drama and how deep it is to justify their chise pfps, and I haven't actually seen that many people be (rightly) disappointed with it. I think the older you are and the more anime you've watched, the more probable it is you won't really enjoy this anime. If this was like your 3rd anime ever and you were 11, yea maybe you would find it interesting, like me (and so many others were) with Elfen Lied, totally understandable.

I watched the whole anime, and I read the second half of the manga to compare some differences and see one particularly infamous scene. The story is the following, Chise and Shuuji are a fresh high school couple. Chise is your typical airheaded type of anime girl, that constantly apologizes and has extremely low self esteem and 0 confidence. Shuuji is her classmate, an athletic and chill type of guy, pretty mature for his age especially compared to all other characters in the story. Here's the twist though, behind the budding romance between two regular high schoolers looms a shadow of a country deep in war - while they're located in Hokkaido, the rest of the country seems to be enveloped in war, and all communication has been cut out and suppressed to keep people in a state of ignorance and normalcy. The two of them start dating in the first episode, and at the end of the first episode Chise is kidnapped by the military and turned into some kind of a cyborg.

The war and why it happens is never really explained. The lack of exposition doesn't bother me in theory especially when the story is character focused - some of my favourite anime like Haibane Renmei deals with this wonderfully, but I think Saikano is very clunky with this. In the first 7 episodes or so I think it's handled well. The war is in the background, and we're not really aware of the scale of it, of the technologies being used, of anything really. But once we get placed into the environment where the war begins to matter, idk Chise and her mega special abilities become hard to overlook and suspend my disbelief for. It's just too supernatural compared to everything else that I can't take what she's going through seriously.

And this brings me to the general emotional turmoil, and really, the main conflict within the story. Chise is just a regular 17 year old girl. She wants to be normal, but she was turned into a monster. There's no going back. She's losing her humanity, she doesn't have a heartbeat, and the instincts of a machine are slowly taking over. There's some existential horror in there that's kind of neat, but it also gets completely overtaken by dramatizing that is so... tripe lol.

Speaking of tripe, I also want to mention the rest of the drama in this anime. First of all, no character was allowed to go uncucked. Everyone had to be cheated on. Cheating happens so much, yet it never really becomes a problem lmfao. Maybe I'm crazy, but the general story structure of the first half is so akin to an eroge. Shuuji has a dumb crybaby gf into him. Also the childhood friend. Also the teacher that raped him in his childhood is now back to have sex with him because her husband is at war (her husband who will attempt to have sex with Chise at some point). Also his childhood friend's sister is into him. Like jesus fucking christ is this the only conflict we can think of? The plot genuinely develops like you're watching a typical hentai, just remove the sex. And lastly, speaking of sex, the anime toned down the manga a lot. The infamous scene I mention earlier is like a 90 page sex scene between Shuuji and Chise. There was no need for it to be so long and drawn out, I think the anime did a great job of adapting it to be shorter.

It's not always that an anime I dislike makes me want to write so much, but this anime is a combo of peak Japan mentality and a very immaturely misogynistic author. From the "it can't be helped" guy, to the "isolated island nation pretending to be living in prosperity while people fall apart internally", to "now that she is my wife I have a right to kill her", this show really was a ride I wouldn't recommend to anyone. And this whole time I didn't even touch upon the fact that Chise and other female characters are drawn like 3 year olds, cankles and bodies with hardly any waist and all, to the point it tends to look disturbing. I feel like the emotional maturity of the show is at its peak in episode 1, when Chise and Shuuji initially discussed becoming a couple. It drew me in with that, and afterwards became the most annoying shit ever. I get what the author wanted - teenagers living in a bleak time wanting to just experience normal life, but nobody acts like a normal human being and if there was no war and if Chise wasn't forced to become a weapon of mass destruction, this would just be a generic harem anime in the early 2000s.