Shimoneta – 12 (Fin)

Shimoneta ends with an adventure on the road, as SOX is summoned by Anna’s mom Sophia to a hot springs district, possibly for some kind of parley. Only when they arrive, there’s no Sophia to welcome them; only Anna and Goriki, who were also summoned. The gang decides to avail themselves of the spa facilities, but what is going on here?

Turns out Anna is the first to break the strict non-coed rules regarding the baths, as she sends Goriki on an impossible errand (her favorite way of getting rid of third parties) and again has her way with Tanukichi, but she’s interrupted by the scream of her own mother, who everyone finds unconscious and in her underwear in the changing room. Now they know someone else brought them here.

That someone is “Black Base”, who claims no connection whatsoever to White Peak despite being a fan of the opposite color of panties. He’s replaced everyone’s clothes with black underwear, and that’s all everyone wears for the rest of the episode, which is a bold but highly appropriate move for the cheekily lewd Shimoneta. 

I especially liked how bashful Ayame and Tanukichi were with one another in such garb, despite plenty of running around either naked or near-naked in their past SOX dealings. But as Ayame says, “this is different,” and she’s right: those were professional duties; this is a lot more intimate.

Also, while Peak and Base represent black and white among SOX’s adversaries, Anna and Ayame are black and white-themed girls in Tanukichi’s life.

Anywho, Black Base finds the rusty metal wheel Tanukichi brought along (given to him by his imprisoned father, who told him to bring it should he ever visit the hot springs district), and will only give it back if they beat him in a strip rock-paper-scissors tournament. Ayame makes good use of Goriki’s nausea-inducing pink underwear to distract Black Base so she and Tanukichi can escape with the wheel and head to the “treasure trove” its supposedly the key for.

While taking a rusty old cable car (which Fuwa gets working in a random cameo) up to the mountain trove, Anna manages to beat Black Base and races back to Tanukichi. Unable to breathe, Tanu accidentally grabs Anna’s butt, sending her into ecstacy, whereupon the whole floor of the cable car gives out, sending her to her into the forest canopy.

I’ll say one thing about Shimoneta, it’s always been incredibly creative about infusing absurd lewdness into its action sequences. Once they’re at the trove, a hidden pedal reveals a hexagonal shaft, upon which Tanu’s rusty wheel fits perfectly.

It takes the full strength of SOX to turn it and open the trove’s doors, revealing a wealth of lewd figurines collected and preserved for posterity. Ayame vows that SOX will continue to preserve such enlightening treasures for future generations, and a fully nude (but thankfully backlit) Black Base, who turns out to have been a good friend and colleague of Tanukichi’s dad, looks on approvingly, knowing the trove is in good hands.

Was the episode, and Shimoneta in general, perfect? Far from it; it never returned Anna to sanity, leaving her a bit one-note at the end; the Ayame-Tanu pairing never materialized; and everyone barfing at Goriki’s underwear seemed a little hypocritical in such an otherwise permissive milieu. But it was still fun, innovative, hilarious, and a surprisingly apt critique of the continuing Japanese struggle to balance decency and lewdness, both crucial parts of the nation’s culture.

Shimoneta – 11

Thankfully, it’s not long before Kosuri’s idealism and desire for revolution is crushed by the realization White Peak really is only interested in dirty panties. She in turn realizes she mad a mistake in betraying Kajou and attempts to stop him with her stun gun, but she’s unsuccessful due to something about Peak’s special area being too wet with wine for the charge to get through to his junk.

Meanwhile, in the woods, Tanukichi encounters Fuwa, who provides another assist by telling him where the GF busjackers ended up. He then meets up with Kajou and he formulates a risky and, naturally, extremely lewd plan to foil GF.

Otome does her part by painting a mural of her and her fellow bus passengers on the floor as an optical illusion to fool her guard, and gets to work drawing 2D paper panties to distract others.

Tanukichi’s plan involves convincing Anna, who will do anything for the sake of “justice” and “righteousness”, to temporarily team up with Blue Snow and SOX in order to rescue the one thing she values over all else: Tanukichi’s stolen underwear.

He makes sure to mask his scent with vast quantities of soap to prevent her from realizing she’s talking to the object of her obession. The plan works like a charm, and Anna proves invaluable at taking out various GF guards. It’s a clever use of Anna, while also being open about the fact it is a little sleazy and manipulative. Then again, Anna is pretty sleazy herself when something she wants (or thinks she needs) is on the line.

The use of non-SOX members to help out SOX continues with the participation of Goriki, Tsukimigusa, and the prefects, who end up neutralizing all the remaining GF members, leaving just White Peak to deal with. Peak has a stun gun attached to his junk somehow, but after a protracted battle, his opponents aim for his balls, and he ends up being kicked out a window and arrested by the PM officers amassed outside.

Thanks to some great teamwork and a brilliant if nasty gambit by Tanukichi, Gathered Fabric is defeated and Kajou is able to publically denounce them and separate SOX from them, over Kosuri’s father’s television network, no less. Kosuri herself prostrates herself and is forgiven and welcomed back into the fold (even though she deserves exile), while Kajou and Tanukichi escape via worm balloon.

There, the two have a very warm and tender exchange in which Kajou even tells Tanukichi that she loves him, albeit as much as she loves dirty jokes…which is a lot! As for Tanukichi, Anna’s antics have definitely turned him off of her, and his affections of well and truly shifted to the brave, stubborn, and if we’re honest, beautiful Kajou Ayame.

Not that anything of consequence will ever come of that affection, but it’s important to note that Tanukichi finally knows the difference between lusting after an ideal (as Kosuri tried to do with GF) and accepting a more natural, realistic love. Tanukichi didn’t choose to fall for Kajou, but it happened, and he’s rolling with it.

Shimoneta – 10

Negotiations between SOX and Gathered Fabric go nowhere as Kajou condemns the group as a mere front for satisfying its members’ fetish for dirty underwear. The next morning, the rival group flexes its superior logistical muscles by sabotaging the monorail and hijacking 42 buses.

That sheer number confirms SOX is way out of its league from scale, logistics, and technical perspectives, considering how hard SOX has worked just to collect enough warm bodies to distribute porn in order to make a dent in society’s forced decency. It’s to the shorthanded SOX’s advantage then, that the hijackers on three of the buses are neutralized by non-SOX members.

An unintentionally badass Fuwa notices her hijacker’s gun is fake; a frustrated Anna hoping to win righteousness brownie points with Tanukichi beats the shit out of her hijacker; Goriki strips down to reveal he wears women’s lingerie, forcing the entire bus into a fit of nausea.

That last incident is also the most revealing character-wise, as Goriki has gone from StuCo stooge to a complex individual in his own right whom, like Anna, might be in SOX were it not for his ultra-conservative conditioning. It also seems more and more like he has feelings for Tanukichi, though those feelings continue to be treated with sophomoric frivolity.

But at the end of the day, GF is still in the driver’s seat, with 39 buses under their control. Heck, they even have the Decency Squad HQ openly discussing what color underwear their female colleagues wear, and in some cases whether they wear any at all. Kajou arranges to bait White Peak, AKA Ichinose Takuma, into a trap where they can capture him and proceed with clearing up the differences between GF and SOX to a confused world.

The trap works, but only to a point: Tanukichi is able to occupy Peak long enough for Kajou to arrive and spout some pretty good monologue about the value of one’s own scent, but in an episode where so many non-SOX members help SOX, it’s an acutal member that ends up screwing them over, and not in a particularly surprising or creative way.

That’s right, after being hardly in the episode (aside from a somewhat unnecessary scene in Tanukichi’s apartment where she’s called upon to procure bait), Kosuri shows her true colors as predicted, literally throwing Kajou under the bus and pledging herself to Ichinose and GF, having lost her faith in SOX’s lighter touch.

It was bad enough when Kosuri was introduced as a little-sister figure and redundant harem member; it’s verging on unacceptable that she could now be the one to bring SOX down from the inside. Still, my money’s still on the group that’s more often than not helped, intentionally or not, by the likes of Anna, Fuwa, and Goriki. The fight to salvage this show from the bane that is Kosuri continues.

Shimoneta – 09

SOX’s simultaneous offensive against both decency and Gathered Fabric continues as Ayame splits Sox up into two groups: one which will distribute dirty material around the school perimeter, and a second which will use Tanukichi’s dirty underwear to lure GF panty thieves whom they’ll then capture as a sign to the establishment that they do not condone GF’s activities.

Kosuri, who is convinced she is far more valuable to SOX than Tanukichi feels shafted when she’s paired with Saotome for the first job, rather than Ayame for the second. When the panties end up luring Anna instead of GF, Kosuri considers it a failure for Tanukichi, but Ayame had planned all along for Anna to take the bait to get her off their backs. Even so, Kosuri rats out Saotome for drawing while they were supposed to be working, further demonstrating her Me-First attitude.

When they try again with the same two teams, things go almost too smoothly for Tanukichi, as one GF member after another fall for the dirty underwear bait like clockwork. Then the lights go out and Tsukimigusa comes in the locker room, and Tanukichi, mistaking her for a GF, uses one of his father’s special moves, thus discovering “she” is really a “he.” Anna comes in too, and mistakes Tanukichi for the “false” Tanukichi she met before, but he’s able to distract her once more by shedding his boxers. I like how no matter what, Anna will not suspect Tanukichi of being a member of SOX; in her eyes, he can do not wrong.

As for Kosuri, she reveals she was the one who sent all the GFs to the locker room for Tanukichi, and also knocked out the lights and turned on the sprinklers. She even collaborated with Fuwa. But all this initiative only gets her scolded by Ayame, to the point she starts to see SOX as no better than her father in that they’re not doing enough.

Then White Peak, the leader of GF (who seems more up Kosuri’s alley anyway), calls SOX out for a formal meeting. Looks like they’re not going away any time soon, and in the meantime, SOX has a self-involved loose cannon in Kosuri to contend with.

Shimoneta – 08

This week’s Shimoneta was a little limp, if you’ll pardon the expression, starting with Kosuri. Despite being excellently voiced by Hocchan, I was worried she’d come to feel like an extraneous character who wouldn’t add anything new to the equation but simply be another cute girl to tempt Tanukichi. The “guy wakes up with girl sleeping next to him” gag has been driven into the ground, as is the “threaten guy with deadly force with a smile” gag.

Worse still, we get introduced to yet another girl in Tsukimigusa Oboro, a novice Decency Squad prefect assigned to the school. Aside from confiscating anything vaguely stick- or hole-shaped, she’s all but devoid of personality; a stiff, wooden cipher. At least she doesn’t show any signs of falling in love with Tanukichi, but the fact she can be so easily convinced to overturn her judgment of what is lewd and what isn’t suggests she’s not very good at her issued job, lessening the threat.

As for Okuma-san, when talking about how he was recruited to SOX to Kosuri over dinner (she’s apparently moved in), his eyes sparkle and his tone suggests he has feelings for Ayame. Kosuri’s knowing look is the first sign she’s detected weakness in Tanukichi, and that’s one thing she doesn’t tolerate in colleagues, we learn, is weakness.

Anna’s messy mishaps always toe the line between hilarious and gross, but being “backed up” due to the prefect confiscating all the school’s TP was firmly on the gross side. Not that poop doesn’t have a place in sexual culture (I ain’t judgin’!), I’d rather have my Anna not almost soil herself while delivering a devastating kick to a member of Gathered Fabric (a group SOX doesn’t even try to deal with this week)…or randomly lick the StuCo table.

While Oboro remains undeveloped, after a night of education and a day spent infiltrating a neighboring school where Ayame wishes to distribute lewd materials and practices, Kosuri goes through some changes, and not the biological kind. She shifts from the cute little sister act to deciding to treat Takukichi like a slave, belieiving she’s far more useful to Blue Snow and he’s been dragging SOX down from the start.

And while she may have been right about that before, Tanukichi has grown less and less reluctant to assist Ayame, whom he’s come to respect and admire almost as much as Pre-Awakening Anna. What he doesn’t agree with are Kosuri’s manipulative methods, playing around with people’s hearts to get her way. Still, Kosuri is calling him out for perceived lack of commitment and usefulness, and the gloves—or rather the striped socks—have come off in a hurry.

Shimoneta – 07

I must admit, I have my doubts about the show introducing a new semi-rival sex terrorist group, along with a new character to add to what is quickly becoming the “SOX harem.” But at the same time, introducing the 10-volume “Okuma x Goriki” BL series is a delicious way of ensuring even when he’s trying to hang with Goriki to avoid Anna, there is no peace for our protagonist. Goriki may not read anything into spending their free time together and making Tanukichi lunch, but Ayame and Otome read a lot into it!

And like I said, that’s when Tanukichi is trying to avoid Anna, which is inherently difficult because she’s a lot craftier and more devious than Goriki, and is able to send him off on pointless errands just to get Tanukichi alone. Her desires are evolving from wanting her would-be lover to “eat” her to her wanting to “eat” him, and since she’s so much quicker and stronger than Tanukichi, he doesn’t have much say in the matter, and he’s only saved by Anna having a premature “crisis”…all over his goddamn face. Naturally, Otome isn’t far away in the bushes, furiously committing the tawdry scene to paper.

There is also something to be said for, in addition to concealing themselves form authorities, SOX is charged with keeping their brand credible, which is hard to do when rogue groups like “Gathered Fabric” (led by “White Peak”) pull stunts that fail to inspire the oppressed masses, and indeed do harm to SOX’s reputation and squander its political capital. Tanukichi doesn’t see them as a big deal, but Ayame believes GF must be “eradicated” like the damaging knock-off group she believes them to be.

That brings us to Onigashira Kosuri, who’s father is a wealthy and influential part of the Establishment. Kosuri, long suffering ennui in such a stifling environment, has an earnest desire to stir the shit, as we see when she launches yogurt balloons at the morality cops. She also reveals her dual personalities—one playing a pure and innocent girl, the other an excited pervert; complete with differing hairstyles—in her first deakings with Tanukichi.

At first, she suspects he’s exactly what he is on the surface—a goody-two-shoes StuCo member. But when he proves to her he’s a SOX member, she literally latches onto him with abandon, completely ignoring the impropriety of him being so close to someone much younger than him.

Tanukichi helps Kosuri convince Ayame that she’s worth having around, as she can supply funding and materials that can facilitate their work, so the addition of Kosuri makes sense, and Hocchan does an okay job with her voice(s), but I’m still not enamored of yet another girl who is basically another love interest for Tanukichi, whose presence can only subtract time better spent in the core triangle of Tanukichi, Ayame, and Anna. But hey, show, prove me wrong.

Shimoneta – 06

With the porn of Yotsuga Forest successfully distributed, Ayame decides the next issue SOX should tackle is the development and distribution of sex aids, from lubes to mechanical vibrators. These things have to be made/built from scratch because they’re no longer in store. Their task is akin to building the pyramids with only the original tech on hand.

It’s tiring work, most of all for Tanukichi, who has to endure a constant stream of dirty talk from Ayame and Otome, but is called “sick” and a “pervert” when he suggest they focus equally on male and female “products for health and beauty.” It’s a hypcrisy that persists in Ayame, who at the end of the day is more naive than Okuma, who had a father in the trade.

Tanukichi also falls victim to a misunderstanding when he pays a visit to Hyouka to pick up the wireless, remote control mini-vibrators she built for them. Not only is Hyouka naked under her robe (after accidentally falling into a water tank), but she wants Tanukichi to repay him by showing her how his “cucumber prepares for battle.”

They’re very close when Anna barges in, and Tanukichi has to come up with a lie to satisfy her in a hurry. He manages to succeed by offering one of the two vibrators to Anna, calling it a “Power Stone.”

Anna makes a blingy pendant of it, but when the remote malfuncitons, it’s stuck on, vibrating her bust, resulting in what can only be described as a hilariously ridiculous spectacle. It also turns Anna on, to the extent she dismisses Goriki, locks herself in the StuCo office with Tanukichi, and proceeds to hold him down.

Tanukichi, about to be raped by someone who has no idea what rape entails, finds his own member barely able to withstand the onslaught of Anna on top of him, but he manages to “preserve his chastity” until the vibrator breaks from overuse, ending the immediate crisis.

The longer-term crisis for Tanukichi, of course, is that Anna immediately demands a new “Power Stone” to replace the one that broke. Worse, whenever he so much as looks or speaks to another girl, Anna grows violently jealous. SOX has truly created a monster.

With the daughter of a high-ranking Morality official getting excited about SOX’s terrorist activities, it looks like he’ll soon have one more girl filling his ears with dirty talk and threatening to incur more of Anna’s wrath.

What had been Tanukichi’s Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist has now become an annoying, stressful, often life-threatening world where dirty jokes—and acts—are rampant and unpredictable. But definitely not boring.

Shimoneta – 05

Shimoneta does not hold back (no pun intended) on the continuing unfortunate results of Anna’s accidental first arousal by Okuma; she is absolutely out of control from start to finish, frightening due to the strength of her convictions (read: delusions), yet also a profoundly tragic figure; a walking, talking, drooling example of everything wrong with her mother’s hardline stance against sex education.

Her mother has kept her bottled up all this time, and now the flood gates are open. Yet so ignorant is she to the basic biology of sex, Anna refers to her discharge as “love nectar”, first mixing it in the dough for cookies made specially for Okuma, then trying to get him to drink it straight from a  bottle where she’s been collecting it. Anna’s complete inability to cope with her lust has turned her into a dribbling, chain link fence-cutting psycho.

All the while, Anna is apparently lucid enough to keep this erratic behavior secret from her mother, who either trusts her daughter enough not to stick her nose in her business (pretty hypocritical, considering how evasive X Prohibition will be to the rest of the Japanese youths) or she’s simply too busy with the PR campaign to bother noticing Anna melt down.

Public Morals begins a crackdown on the school specifically to dissuade students from storming Yotsuga Forest where the porn stash is believed to be located. Yet Ayame goes anyway, willing to storm the place on her own, no matter the consequences, as a matter of principle, and in hopes she’ll inspire others.

Her suicide mission is interrupted by the cavalry: Fuwa Hyouka found Otome’s lewd drawings Okuma dropped in her lab when Anna was chasing him, and she distributed them to the student body, which came to the forest en masse. She uses all the boys as a diversion against the morality cops, and sends the girls in.

Sophia’s rally at her daughter’s school is ruined, so Anna goes to the forest and locates both Blue Snow and Okuma (who is in a light disguise). Ayame orders Okuma to save himself, but even when he lands smack-dab in the Cave of Porn, he decides he’s not going to let Anna unmask and punish Blue Snow. He probably realizes the ideal life he imagined with Anna isn’t going to happen.

He emerges wearing woman’s lingerie, and the sight of his package is enough to make Anna hysterical, as they used to say in olden times. Unaware it’s Okuma behind the pantymask, she’s so ashamed of her body reacting so intensely to another man, she literally jumps off a cliff and flies away, leaving a love nectar rainbow in her wake. That’s right, a love nectar rainbow. I sure didn’t see that coming!

Even SOX are rendered bewildered and speechless, but at the end of the day, they successfully got all of their fellow students to storm the forest, and scored a huge haul of fresh and diverse porn with which Otome can be inspired to create an ever-richer catalogue of illustrations for distribution. They even manage to switch the signatures from other schools with those illustrations, and Sophia makes the mistake of holding one up without looking at it first while on a live nationwide broadcast with no tape delay.

It’s a huge coup for SOX, who were on the cusp of being wiped out, because the scandal essentially stops the X Prohibition Law in its tracks, as well as gets Sophia in trouble. Thinks are looking good for the ero-terrorists, but more challenges lie ahead, one of which is named Anna Nishikinomiya.

Shimoneta – 04

At first, Anna seems to be processing her “experience” with Okuma last week by clamping down on school indecency, tightening her grip on public morality as her mother prepares to make a speech at her school on her “final solution” for nipping lewdness in the bud and preserving the purity of Japan’s youth, saving them from their own base urges. Anna is also straight-up avoiding Okuma, making him think she despises him now.

With a vote on the X Prohibition Law looming, Ayame briefs her SOX team of Okuma and Otome on their next mission, which is to storm a forest where hardcore porn is known to be located (the forest was once the property of a famous pornographer) with a mass of “cherry” boys and girls from school, overwhelming the authorities with numbers. SOX is not the only dirty terror group, but one of several all working to free Japan from the shackles of artificial sexual repression.

Anna’s mom ends up surprising Ayame by announcing the student vote for X Prohibition will take place the same time control will be lifted from the porn forest. She also unveils the future of oppression: heavy-duty chastity belts that prevent any fooling around in that area by either sex, further closing off that crucial part of the human anatomy to youth a a crucial time in their development. The image is somewhat humorous, but the idea behind it is truly chilling.

Ayame is pissed off about her plan becoming far more difficult, but she still thinks she can convince the student body to storm the forest IF she can get Otome out of her artistic funk. To do that, Ayame exploits Okuma’s new stalker, who has stuffed his mailbox with love letters and left puddles of saliva on his patio, by putting a note telling her to come in, all while Otome hides in his closet and observes.

Okuma is convinced nothing will happen and Otome will see nothing interesting, but he ends up about as wrong as it is humanly possible to be, as his stalker turns out to be Anna, who is extremely sex-crazed despite having no idea what sex is. She enters Okuma’s apartment, tears his and her clothes off, mounts him, and starts licking him. All she knows is that this feels good, so it must be good, and right, and pure.

Clearly having no idea the note on Okuma’s door would be so successful, Ayame walks in on this spectacle, and Anna basically grabs her clothes and runs out in embarrassment, yet still in a kind of trance in which she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with what she’s doing. Why would she? Her parents never told her about this kind of stuff. Yet the burning in her loins cannot be denied.

It took an accidental kiss during a stalker dust-up, but Okuma’s beloved angel Anna has well and truly broken out of her shell. Her ignorance is such that rather than admit her harsher enforcement measures at school constitute gross hypocrisy considering how she’s been behaving on the side vis-a-vis Okuma, she absolves herself by proclaiming that “love is justice”, and that the more she doles out on others, the more love she’s able to give to Okuma.

Absent any kind of proper education on romance or sex, Anna is quite literally making it up as she goes along. Even more troubling, her authority and pedigree are such that few can dare challenge her improvisatory philosophy. She’s suddenly become quite the hedonist, but she’s playing with porn-burning fire.

Most surprisingly, Anna put her money where dirty-talking Ayame’s mouth is, taking debauchery to levels that make Blue Snow herself blush. Or in baseball terms (Hi Preston!), Ayame has been shouting slogans from the stands, but it’s Anna who rounded second base and slid into third, naked and drooling.

Shimoneta – 03

After top art student and school’s pride, Saotome Otome, caught a glimpse of Okuma and Ayame’s rooftop antics, she literally snags him on a chain and drags him away to her studio, where she presumes he can assist her with (or rather she can blackmail him into) helping her with a romantic problem that is making her art suffer. The subject of her affections? Anna. So when Okuma must tell her who he loves, he says the first girl’s name that comes to mind: Ayame, so as to avoid conflict.

But Otome’s artists’ block is merely a side effect of a much larger problem that afflicts not only her, but much of the population: a decade of PMs and oppression is leaving large swaths of the population unable to express their love, or even identify what they’re feeling as such. This isn’t surprising; dirty jokes and the sexual knowledge that makes them dirty are crucial to natural human interaction. Without them, there’s a large gap that is filled with whatever else people can come up with.

For a certain unsavory admirer of Anna, that something is stalking and candid photos with threatening messages. Anna is shaken by this, but Ayame assure Okuma she’ll protect her while he tries to get Otome to join SOX, revealing that her friendship to Anna is genuine, even if the two are on opposite ends of the moral spectrum. Anna, after all, is person who made it possible for Ayame to exist in normal society; she’d surely be in jail without her. But with the very survival of the human race is at stake, and so Ayame must act against her best friend.

Anna, for her part, knows Okuma isn’t the stalker, despite Goriki’s suspicions (which are his own way of expressing his own love for Anna), and agrees to a sting in which Ayame will dress as a boy as they go on a date. At the same time, Otome plans her own rescue of Anna by the stalker, shaving Okuma’s legs and putting him in drag (for the second straight episode).

As they wait in the bushes, Otome cannot help but compulsively draw Anna, her first real model, in her own unique way of expressing her love. The resulting sting is a pretty thrilling and complex bit of physicality, as not only does the stalker turn out to be huge, but there are three of them, and not everyone in a position to protect Anna is close enough to stop their attacks.

Fortunately, Ayame knows right where to kick the first stalker, and Okuma is in time to stop the next one with a devastating right. Interestingly, he moved out of instinct, but isn’t sure who he moved for: Ayame, whom he told Otome he loved on a whim? Or Anna? Heck, why not both!

Whoever he was trying to protect, he loses his wig and takes a rock to the back of the head, and ends up not only landing on top of a stunned Anna, but his lips and legs end up locked with hers for a not inconsequential amount of time before he gets up, starts to apologize, and passes out from the rock blow.

As for Anna, that sudden closeness to a boy and the touch of his lips seems to awaken her libido with a vengeance. Again, she has no idea what’s going on, but she knows it feels amazing. Will this be an isolated incident eventually forgotten, or will Anna never look at Okuma the same again?

Shimoneta – 02

To borrow a couple of sophomoric double entendres from Blue Snow, Okuma is in a tight spot; between a rock and a hard place. He admires and idolizes the pure, perfect Anna (who shows no signs of being anything other than that, with no hidden dark side), but is being forced through blackmail and coersion by Ayame to undermine her.

I will say, both Ayame and Okuma are well-positioned in terms of hiding in plain sight, and Okuma’s story of how he was ostracized when his “terrorist” father was put away and met the “guardian angel” Anna in grade school (something she doesn’t remember) that inspired him to live a purer life, is a great cover story.

But Ayame is stripping the primacy of his goal away as she exposes him to more and more misbehavior, as Okuma can’t deny the thrill he gets from finding ultra-rare smutty mags in an abandoned cabin, like buried treasure. When the imagery therein is copied and distributed around school, Anna is so ignorant to its insidiousness she herself frames a picture of a girl performing fellatio in the StuCo office!

That gets to another bigger social issue about the whole anti-dirty-joke law and PM devices: real-world Japan’s brith rate can’t keep up with its aging population; if laws were put into place to block the people’s natural sexual development and keep them in the dark about reproduction (if such a thing were even possible), it would be a de facto form of population control. Maybe the Japan of Shimoneta wants the population to decrease.

In any case, Anna’s powerful, driven politician mother is introducing a new bill that would step up the oppression even further, legalizing the monitoring of every action and conversation in the country. With no stones unturned, Ayame’s terrorism could not continue, her crusade to educate the ignorant masses would end in defeat, and most importantly, the people would have no privacy whatsoever in the new surveillance state. Ayame makes sure to impress upon Okuma that while she has her own selfish reasons for doing what she does, she’s also working in best interests of a free society.

Thus, the fight must not only continue, but be stepped up. Ayame dresses Okuma up like a Blue Snow decoy to give students dirty word eye exams during school physicals while she steals the boys’ urine samples, hoping to start a scandal in the school when tests reveal high levels of masturbation. The operation also results in Anna yelling out the howler above.

Anna isn’t portrayed as an idol fool here, but actually comes quite close to exposing and capturing Okuma-in-drag more than once, and presses her pursuit of him with heretofore unseen (and somewhat frightening) superhuman strength and speed. Game Over for Okuma and Ayame is rarely less than a few seconds or inches (heh-heh) away, but with one last misdirection, Ayame manages to save Okuma and make off with the urine.

The fact that the entire final exchange is witnessed by a painter in a crow’s nest—likely the same painter who painted the pure “Sound of Music”-style painting Okuma lingered on—means the ranks of Ayame’s SOX are likely to swell in the near future, which bodes well for defeating Anna and stopping her mom’s overreaching legislation.

Shimoneta – 01 (First Impressions)

Rundown: In a titular “boring world where the concept of dirty jokes doesn’t exist”, because they are forbidden by moral law, Okuma Tanukichi manages to transfer from one of the least moral to the most moral high school in the country, to be closer to his crush, StuCo President Nishikinomiya Anna.

His dreams of a pure high school life are dashed when he’s approached by the Vice President, Kajou Ayame, whose alter-ego “Blue Snow” (or “Blue in the Snow Field”) is a “decency terrorist”, who uses his feelings for Anna and her own high standing in the school to blackmail him into helping to found the “Anti-Societal Organization” or SOX with her.

Analysis: Shimoneta[…] may have a ridiculously long title and a concept as high as a kite, but it quickly commits to and fully owns its silliness. Aside from a few choice pieces of sexy dialogue uttered by Blue Snow, most of the “dirty jokes” she whips up aren’t just tame, but awkwardly and often arbitrarily used, which makes perfect sense in the context of the show. Kajou Ayame may be a serial distributor of blue material, but she’s new to it too, and wields it with wild abandon and gusto.

Okuma may actually be more well-versed than Ayame, due to his time spent at a school of lower moral fiber, which, in addition to his dirty joke terrorist father, makes him a natural target for Ayame’s gaze. And if you strip away the blue sheen, this show has some pretty dark and interesting undertones about an invasive, oppressive police state that leaves its youth so cripplingly ignorant to the act of reproduction, that a few moments of Ayame’s antics are able to “finish off” the vast majority of them at a school assembly.

The metaphor is tired, but apt: Ayame aims to break the dam and restore this boring world to a state of natural sexual freedom, and whether he likes it or not, Okuma and her are uniquely positioned to make meaningful change, and have a lot of fun in the process.

Shimoneta’s dialogue—at once stuffed with bleeped bad words and hilarious euphemisms (and a whole lot of incorrect information about how babies are made)—crackles and pops as the wild Kajou darts across the screen, a human spectacle with a mask made from pantsu and a towel that threatens to fall off and reveal all.

President Anna and Treasurer Raiki serve as agents of the system and defenders of the oppressive and ultimately unnatural order, but interesting, neither seem like they’re hypocrites, making their battle against the front-line revolutionaries Ayame and Okuma more interesting than simply good-vs.-evil (that, and the fact Okuma deeply admires Anna).

This is a battle between ignorance and knowledge, and Ayame is the Eve who has tasted of the fruit and works towards the creation of an exciting world where the concept of dirty jokes, among other things, does exist. Which sounds like the ingredients for a boisterous, refreshing comedy…but comedy tempered by the knowledge that hundreds of millions of people in the real world live under regimes that stifle free expression as “violations of the established order.”

I’m not sure the show will get that serious (the jaunty dance number at the end would seem to indicate not very), but the undertones are there, and they lend righteousness to Blue Snow’s crusade that rises this show above farce and dirty jokes for dirty jokes’ sake.