It’s so fucking over, bros.
My dreams… All these years of praising Masahiko Oota directed anime… All my opinions have been crushed into dustfilth because of this STUPID DEER ANIME. I’ve gone over their successes time and time again. Minami-ke, Yuru Yuri, Mitsudomoe, Love Lab, Sabagebu, Gabriel Dropout. None of it means ANYTHING because when you look at their recent works, you must shield your eyeballs.. 2018, they adapted fucking UZAMAID. WHY did they do it, bros? I don’t even see people bring up Kodomo no Jikan anymore because when people talk about shitty lolicon anime, they always point out UZAMAID now. And you know what comes after that? A fucking ISEKAI NARO-KEI anime called NOUKIN. It’s EVEN WORSE. Watching episodes of that anime made me want to reincarnate… into a DEAD BODY! And now, finally, 6 years after Uzamaid, the writers and animators of the epic Oota team have come together to make one last masterpiece, to erase the mistakes of their past. And they choose Shikanoko. And EVERYONE HATES IT! Shikanoko, according to my anime review index thingie, is ranked as one of the WORST anime EVER MADE.
This anime was SO bad I had to migrate to fucking BLUESKY. Do you know how humiliating that is? I left my Anilist account in shame. I’m no longer one of the cool kids, but a washed up 28 year old PENIS licker who watches this shit and then WRITES about it. Nobody fucking WRITES anymore bros, there aren’t even any blog websites left that fucking WORK. I have to post my thoughts on fucking BLOGSPOT! Does it get ANY worse than that? At this point I might as well KILL myself but I’m afraid if I did that, I’d be isekai’d into DOO DOO LAND. And guess what, that’s even worse than having to post on Bluesky.
Your brain will be turned into deer soup after watching this.
So what fucking went wrong then? To figure this out, I had to do the unthinkable and read the Shikanoko manga to figure out if the anime being bad was the anime team’s fault or the original manga author’s fault. And truth be told, my hands were shaking while I was reading the manga. Because it wasn’t even that bad. I had to tearfully accept that my beloved anime creators have released mid and it was ALL their fault. And even worse, Shikanoko was up big in the spotlight. Everybody knew about this show right away because of the dumb Shikanoko dancing meme. So when this show flopped, it flopped BIG TIME. Basically they slipped on a big banana peel right in the middle of the Budokan for everyone to point and LAUGH at them. In a BAD WAY.
Was I gaslighting myself the entire time? Was Sabagebu actually bad? Was MItsudomoe actually bad? Was Yuru Yuri actually bad? Was Minami-ke, my FAVORITE anime of ALL time, actually bad??? The answer to all these questions… is yes. The critics were right. It truly WAS all epic lolrandom humor. It WAS all forced animation, and yes, ALL their anime are made for lolicons. And all because they had to make an anime about DEER! Was it worth it, you absolute FOOLS??? Let’s get something straight, deer are NOT FUNNY. Name literally one thing about deer that is funny.. Oh wait that’s right, you CAN’T because deer just stand around and eat GRASS.
I hyped this anime up, bros… You don’t understand… It’s all my fault that it turned out this way… My reputation in tatters… Let’s go over the character list.
Would you mind explaining to the audience why your anime is a MONUMENTAL FAILURE?
Torako: Despite supposedly having a personality and a backstory, our main character Torako spends the entire anime being SHOCKED and HORRIFIED and PISSED OFF from the antics caused by the other characters of this show. Mainly, the antics caused by lead deer-girl character Noko. If there was ever a straightman to end all straightmans, nobody has ever had to react harder and more frequently to anything than Torako does in this anime.
Noko: She is our star of the show, the epic and hilarious deer-girl that everything in the story revolves around. She can take her antlers off, as well as taking the top of her head off and using the empty space for storage. Only the main character Torako seems to think there’s anything wrong with her. Also she eats a lot of deer crackers because she’s a DEER. GET IT?
Anko: She is the younger sister of our main character. Anko is obsessed with Torako, behaving violently towards anyone who gets close to her. That’s IT. That’s ALL SHE DOES. NEXT CHARACTER
Meme: Yes, there’s a character named epic MEME, just like in that one other epic meme anime Bakemonogatari. The big difference being that where Bakemonogatari Meme plays an important role in his story, the Shikanoko Meme just EATS RICE FROM A BOWL. She doesn’t do ANYTHING ELSE. NEXT CHARACTER
Neko: She is the tsundere of the cast. She pretends she doesn’t want to be a part of the deer club but she actually does. Hilarious right? NEXT CHARACTER
Chiharu: I’m gonna be honest, I completely forgot this character even existed. She has a stoic blank expression on her face at all times and seems to only respond positively to deer-related material.
What a cast, huh? What they do across each episode of the anime is sit around in the deer club room while Noko does stupid things. I’ll be fair in this regard though, they don’t spend the whole anime in this one room. I’ve seen shows like Joshiraku (a good anime) and Seitokai no Ichizon (not that good of an anime) where literally the entire show takes place in a single club room. In Shikanoko’s case, you can’t say that they aren’t trying to spice things up from episode to episode. Noko’s antics occur in different classrooms, up in the mountains, down at the zoo, or even in a boxing ring.
Noko endures an ongoing fight to win over the audience.
For what it’s worth, the animation team are trying their damn hearts out to make each scene epic and hilarious. This is a quality of theirs that has always stayed in focus, whether they’re adapting kino like Yuru Yuri or trash like Uzamaid. Their visual gags are always on point. And yet, the absurd style of this anime and the absurd style of the manga don’t mix together! Considering how this team has handled absurdist humor in past shows like Sabagebu, I’m left wondering why I had little problems watching that anime, yet I end up glazing over much of the absurdity in Shikanoko.
My theory is, and I hate to say it, that the Shikanoko anime adaptation is TOO stupid. I have to clarify the anime specifically, because the manga is condensed enough for its insane gags to work for the most part. The anime draws everything out to an extreme, to the point where the dumb jokes stop being surprising and start becoming exhausting. It doesn’t help that Shikanoko’s jokes are hardly clever so much as they’re purely ridiculous. I’d still prefer this kind of exaggerated humor over Joke Purgatory adaptations such as Nisekoi or Wataten. I’d also prefer a good comedy as well, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
In all truthfulness, I don’t hate the Shikanoko adaptation, but I don’t enjoy watching most of it. Most of my respect for this adaptation is respect for the team that tried to make something unique and hilarious out of it. You can hate it all you want, but you can’t say they didn’t put effort into this. Unfortunately, I still wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, though I might recommend picking up the manga if you’re not against the premise of the show. I hate the use of terms like CRINGE and LOLRANDOM, but in the case of Shikanoko, it’s not an easy task to defend this one against its detractors. This is as close as we’re getting to the buzzword usage of ‘forced animation’ actually materializing. It’s not necessarily that the animators are forcing the jokes on you, but rather they are taking gags that are already absurd, and forcing them through extra emphasis and exaggeration to become far more stupid than is needed for a quick laugh. Because of this, Shikanoko has no breathing room. This is what separates Shikanoko’s jokes from other cartoonish anime like Nichijou and Sabagebu. Shikanoko is relentless, and because of this, it loses the impact from the only thing that sets it apart from other comedies: Its absurdity.
One more step until the end…
Summary/final score
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