Ill be the first to admit I am an inconsistent writer. My life is a constant barrage of new tasks and distractions that keeps me from accomplishing well pretty much everything I set my mind to. Things get especially difficult to manage around the holiday season but here I am back in the game because over the past 13 or so weeks Ive been subjected to one of the most indefensibly pisspoor psychologically agitating pieces of art Ive ever seen in my entire life. Hametsu no Whatever Who Actually Gives a Shit About the Title of This Garbage is the rare kind of complete and utter disaster that only surfaces once every few years whenever anime studios have to really start scraping the bottom of the barrel for content. It singlehandedly snapped me out of my depressive stupor because of how eyeopeningly bad it was. It even inspired me in a way to never produce anything on this level of quality lest I never call myself an artist again in my life. Ive started writing and illustrating again thanks to Hametsu and I at least owe it or the author of the webcomic or the staff behind the adaptation a bit of thanks by trying to interpret this work of pure schizophrenia before I inevitably sink back into the oblivion of daily apathy. Hametsu is an anime where not a single aspect of it is pleasant or inviting. It shocks you in with a bleak cynical first episode full of rape slavery genocide and just about every one of humanitys worse vices before shifting gears and psychotically jumping between genres every single episode like an ADHD kid who managed to ingest a red skittle and keeps trying to entertain himself with whatevers around him. We go from EXTREMELY fucking edgy revenge fantasies where characters unironically say stuff like I dont even feel like raping you so Ill just kill you that sounds more like an Anal Cunt song title than real dialogue while standing waistdeep in pools of blood rife with fauxphilosophical melodrama about how humanity isLE BAD to corny shoujo shenanigans where the unbearably annoying main girl fawns over the edgelord bishounen MC and gets scared by a spider or something and turns into a chibi while silly comedic music plays. It genuinely feels like a series that was on the brink of getting axed every chapter. At a certain point I shouldve discerned that there was nothing of value on display here and moved on but its hard to look away from a trainwreck. From the very first episode Hametsu wants you to know that this is a serious show. The comically evil and petty human emperor genocides every witch on the planet because modern technology has made magic obsolete the emperor actually says the fruit of our wisdom the smartphone is superior to fucking magic that can level cities and sexually assaults Adonis mentor/love interest in front of him before shooting her in the head while thousands of people salivate like animals. Adonis is then placed into stasis for some reason they never really explain this brilliant little moment of bad writing to let his hatred marinate for a few years until hes ready to kill his way to the emperor. Want to understand the complex mechanisms at play that led to all of this happening? Its simple really. The queen is actually a timetraveling witch who has the power to mind control everyone on earth except for other witches who are all female and reproduce asexually using a magic tree on the moon and the other female MC is a reincarnation of her from the future who has the same magic power as her or something according to the author Yoruhashis previous work which is untranslated so Im doing my best to try and interpret it using what meager Japanese I know so she decides to mind control the king and everyone under her rule into hating witches so she can wipe them all out and end any competition to her reign and also the antiwitch technology is giving everyone super cancer. Got all that? Good because after Pinkshit Im not even going to dignify this character by calling her by name youll learn why later manages to execute a prison break by stealing the controls from a wildly out of place caricature of a transsexual Adonis breaks out and decides that instead of killing the emperor hed rather cause 9/11 2 and gun down thousands of innocent people children included onscreen because theyre guilty by association. From there the show descends into misery porn and over the top wangst for the next 5 or so episodes. They go to the moon all the witches want to revive Adonis mentor and kill him he summons the humans to kill them instead and revives Pinkshit an annoying nag hes known for all of a day kills a guy named Yamato who wants to fuck his sister or something burns down the magic witch tree and leaves. Is this Alpha Male behavior or blatant stupidity? Also remember the king? The queen brainwashes him into an heroing by throwing himself off a building because he got super cancer from the antiwitch technology. Hes not important after all. What is important however is her becoming an Idol of all things because it wouldnt be a product of the absolute dregs of the anime industry in 2023 without idolshit being forced in even when it makes zero sense inuniverse. Now the two are suddenly back on earth and the show takes a few episodes to devolve into a bunch of thinlyconnected shoujolite moments where Pinkshit and Adonis are radically different characters out of nowhere and theres an unfunny quip or silly moment every 5 seconds. This is where the series two main issues become clear as day firstly it cant commit to anything. The tone shifts around with little restraint in between episodes sometimes multiple times within the span of 2 minutes. It introduces a dozen new characters every single episode and either kills them off before they can meaningfully grow or develop or blatantly writes them out of the story once the writer gets bored of whatever subplot they spawned from. Even Adonis revenge plot gets phased out halfway through the fucking anime. This is not how you write a compelling story this is a teenagers emotionally charged fanfiction youd read on LiveJournal in 2006 where every character is based on someone from their high school. The second glaring issue of Hametsu is how unlikeable each and every character is. I dont think Adonis requires or deserves an indepth explanation hes a onedimensional perpetually emo dipshit with zero critical thinking skills who cant even seem to remember his own motivation. He gets his ass kicked in every single fight and only manages to win because of his tremendous plot armor. No one ever refutes his insane rhetoric outside the other worst character Pinkshit who is honest to God one of the most insufferable characters ever written. She is a walking woman moment nearly every single line of dialogue from her is her whining and crying about how Adonis shouldnt kill the enemy combatants who are literally trying to murder and/or enslave the both of them and their entire race at any given moment. She doesnt shed any tears for the innocent people Adonis slaughtered earlier in the show but shes more than willing to slap him in the face and bitch him out for defending her from the neverending onslaught of armed soldiers and cyborgs who want nothing more than to see them hanging and literally killed off the last members of her entire fucking race a few minutes ago. Pinkshits even more out of touch with reality than the guy who wants to commit mass murder and shes supposed to be the moral high ground of the anime. Every 5 seconds shes whining about how we can all still live in peace like a braindead hippie who reduces every single complex human thought process down to the simplest possible rationalization. Sure she may have a point this conflict is only arbitrary and wouldve been avoided altogether if anyone in this setting wasnt staggeringly retarded but just because every character is a slave to their own emotions perpetuating a totally pointless and dumb as fuck battle doesnt mean we need a character pointing out whats already obvious every single minute theyre onscreen as if that isnt the most annoying thing a writer can do. Im not sure if Pinkshits intentionally written to be out of touch because you can never be sure of anything with this show but if she is it shows the author has only an incredibly shallow and cursory grasp on the concept of pacifism. Writing a character who is both nave and likeable is admittedly difficult and Yoruhashi decides to forgo that entirely by writing Pinkshit to be so comically stupid and braindead that any sense of likeability is automatically thrown out the window whenever she opens her hole. The only thing she really excels at is rabidly simping for Adonis and taking the brunt of his abuse because pandering to the I can fix him crowd is a guaranteed way to print money. Meanwhile every other character in Hametsu is some kind of raving degenerate with no moral compass or a weird sex pervert. Theyre all shallow onedimensional psychopaths. As a matter of fact I couldnt tell you any of their names but I can tell you what atrocities they engage in because every character in Hametsu would feel right at home in the Dirlewanger Brigade. And the more savagery and inhumanity gets thrown in your face the cheaper and emptier it starts to feel. There is no moral gray area here outside of Adonis everything is presented in extremes. In Hametsu you are either a good guy or a remorseless monster who will gladly inflict any type of suffering onto whoever you can when its convenient. The only inbetween is Adonis whose massmurdering behavior gets portrayed more like a hes just a tortured bad boy making a few mistakes rather than a victim warped into a mass murderer by his circumstances. He has no depth. If the story even bothered trying to explore his thought process and rather than trying to gloss over his atrocities thered be at least some semblance of humanity to him. But then his previously defined personality gets thrown out because Pinkshits intolerable idealism starts rubbing off on him. At the end of the day the only character I can say I thoroughly enjoyed watching onscreen was Shirousagi the white guy with dreads and an absolutely baller hat who beats Adonis so hard he looks like hes about to cry and gouges out Pinkshits eyes onscreen. What a Chad. He is exactly what hes presented as and in his case thats alright because hes a stone cold badass and the closest I came to actually rooting for a character in this entire anime. Hametsu is probably the only anime where a guy who looks like Brian Welch rips out a Mori Calliope clones eyes and then crushes them so at the very least you cant call it unoriginal. Youd think Id at least have something good to say about Hametsu after I spent nearly 2000 words railing on it harder than a Thailand ladyboy maybe some words of praise for the production quality of the anime? Woefully there is none. Yokohama Animation Lab is just about the very bottom rung in the anime studio society almost every project of theirs is rated a 6 or below on here and thats probably not an accurate gauge considering how many users wantonly hand out 10s to every anime they watch. The opening animation is probably where 99 of the shows budget went and if Im being truthful its not that bad. The song Kieru Made by Hana Hope is far too pretty and refined for a show like this. It almost feels dishonest I was expecting something more like Musashi Gundohs infamously deranged opening thats a clear and present indication of exactly what youre about to watch but Hametsus opening feels like it belongs to a much more refutable anime. And on that note I cant bring myself to praise its extremely shitty animation and presentation. Im not sure what I expected considering the source material was almost entirely unknown outside Japan before the anime was announced but this anime treats drag and drop animation like a fucking Olympic sport. Every fight is a slideshow where offmodel characters slowly move across still frames and jitter around. Theres a scene in episode 11 where Pinkshit drops to the ground thats utterly weightless and she looks completely stiff. This scene was so ridiculous looking I had to pause the episode and get a drink to steel myself into finishing it. The anime was directed by School Days director Keitarou Motonaga a guy who is infamous in this day and age for fundamentally not understanding the source material of the projects he directs see: Digimon Adventure tri an incredibly pretentious borderline fanfictiontier movie series that almost killed the franchise in terms of animated projects. Hametsu is a show I cant fathom anyone taking seriously even the people behind it. The part of my mind thats still trying to comprehend why this even exists can only rationalize it as being some kind of avantgarde parodic work. It is one of the few anime Ive seen that goes from comically overblown edge and misanthropy to goofy preschool humor within the span of a minute every single episode. Theres a scene in episode 3 or so where Adonis brutally kills a bunch of soldiers onscreen and within 20 seconds or so it cuts to one of the villain generals chibified and dancing around while making stupid noises. Thats basically the thesis statement of this anime. Either nobody had any idea what they were doing behind the scenes or they knew exactly what they were doing and none of us are intelligent enough to grasp this kind of cuttingedge satire. Either way tldr: https://i.ur.com/WYNwMyK.png