Disaster Report: First Love Monster

It’s hard to come up with a new twist on shoujo romance. We have over half a century’s worth of manga and anime on the subject, and often it feels like virtually every twist and concept possible has been explored at least once. Good creators can overcome this sense of fatigue through thoughtful writing and new perspectives. Bad creators overcome it by adding sensationalist elements to grab the public’s notice, and more often than not this trick is turned until the sensationalist part becomes normalized. We’ve seen this happen before with lolicon. We saw it happen more recently with incest, particularly where little sisters are concerned. In the case of First Love Monster, based on the manga by Akira Hiyoshimaru, we saw it attempted yet again with one of the few taboos left in the world of anime and manga: shotacon.

Shotacon, like lolicon before it, is a Japanese slang term for the sexualized portrayal of pre-pubescent children. In this case it’s focused on boys, but unlike lolicon it’s still mostly regulated to the odd doujinshi, a questionable subset of boys’ love manga, and hentai OVAs that were popular only as joke recommendations by internet edgelords. There’s a legitimate argument to be had over why shotacon is still considered gross by otaku at large while lolicon became normalized or the failings in Japan’s laws regarding child pornography, but that's far beyond the scope of this review. What is important is that it was still a controversial subject when the now defunct Aria magazine started serializing First Love Monster in 2013, and it was still controversial when that same manga was turned into an anime in the summer of 2016.

To be fair, First Love Monster doesn’t try to hide its shotacon twist; it’s revealed in the very first episode. This story follows Kaho, an extremely shy, self-depreciating, and sheltered 15-year-old rich girl. She sets out to live on her own so that she can make friends that aren’t influenced by her wealth, but on her first day out she nearly gets run over. She’s saved at the last minute by a tall, handsome boy, and she soon discovers that this same boy is her landlord’s ten-year-old son Kanade. For the rest of the series, Kaho is torn between her love for Kanade and her awareness and fear of the impropriety of their age difference, all while dealing with both her wacky housemates and Kanade’s own gang of fifth-grade friends, many of which are just as overgrown as he is. You’d think that this would be enough to carry a dozen episodes, but that is where you would be wrong. That is the most shocking thing about First Love Monster: once you get past the premise, there’s simply nothing of value to be found within the show.

Kaho and Kanade’s so-called romance should be the driving force behind the plot, but instead of moving forward it simply spins in place for the entirety of the show’s run. Aside from the sizeable age gap and the legal ramifications thereof, the biggest problem is that neither of them have the slightest understanding of what romance even is. Kaho is naïve and weak-willed, a lonely little rich girl who only knows romance from her fantasies and was all too ready to fall in love with the first guy to give her the time of day. When pressed for a reason, the only one Kaho ever gives is that Kanade was the first person to ever get angry at her.

As for Kanade, he’s simply too young to understand what having a girlfriend truly means. He treats Kaho more like a playmate than anything else, and even when he promises to commit to her it’s treated with all the seriousness of a child promising to marry their teacher. It’s little wonder that their relationship can barely get off the ground when it’s built upon such a deeply flawed foundation. The only time it changes is when one of the two breaks up with the other, either because Kaho can no longer tolerate Kanade’s childishness or because it’s the set-up for a joke.

First Love Monster is technically a romantic comedy, but its notion of comedy is just as stunted as its notion of romance. There are precisely three kinds of jokes to be found in First Love Monster:

1. Kanade and his friends do gross, silly little boy things like playing bancho and chanting “weiner” and “poop” at every opportunity.
2. Kanade does or says something that seems seductive. Kaho blushes and flusters, only for to be revealed that Kanade was actually doing something immature.
3. Kaho’s housemates abuse or humiliate either Kaho or Kota, a teen boy resident who is equally as nervous and weak-willed as Kaho

All of these jokes are repeated ad nauseum, and none of them are particularly funny to begin with. The first two only serve to reinforce the imbalance in Kaho and Kanade’s relationship, while the last one tries to mine humor from denigrating Kaho or shocking her with the other, equally perverse goings-on in the household. Both she and the viewer alike have to endure an otaku pedophile obsessed with a cat-eared boy idol, a two-faced, underpants-sniffing stalker, and a sadistic, abusive douchebag whose only purpose is to threaten Kaho with rape early on and sticks around to harangue her for the rest of the show, all in the name of “comedy.” Even when Kaho heads back home, she’s not safe as she has an obsessive older brother with a major sister complex and a tendency to collect every little bit of trash her body has ever touched. 

There’s only two times that the show deviates from this formula, and both are in the final episode. The first is an extended dream sequence that involves Kanade becoming a high-school-aged idol, a skate-off for Kaho’s favor, and pastries coming out of people’s armpits. The second is a two minute sequence where Kaho’s frustration with Kanade’s childishness explodes into an angry rant. For a brief moment, the audience is lead to believe that there might be hope for Kaho yet, that she might finally have grown up enough to move past her naivite and her childish obsession. That hope is killed the moment that Kanade laughs over the fact that she said “poop” and “weiner” a lot and Kaho resigns herself to the status quo as the credits roll. This sudden stop is the final joke towards the audience, mocking them for expecting any sort of resolution for a show that not only was based on an ongoing manga, but didn't have much of a plot to resolve in the first place.

I’ve seen some reviews that view First Love Monster’s brand of humor as a sort of commentary on the audience. It presumes that its audience are the sort of self-deprecitating fangirls who consume this sort of sleezy material wholesale even as they judge themselves for doing so, the sort who only semi-ironically call themselves ‘trash.’ Thus, when the show ladles abuse upon Kaho for pursuing her desires, it’s only imitating what its viewers are doing in a sort of twisted solidarity. Personally, I don’t buy this theory. If this show were smarter, more outrageous, or more self-aware, then I could see it being a parable for the perverse relationship female otaku can have with the media they consume. At the very least, it could have turned into a Koi Kaze-style exploration of Kaho's background and what would drive her to do something like date a 10-year old. That being said, there’s nothing here in the way of plot, character, or theme that would suggest that either the original mangaka or the screenwriters had anything so ambitious in mind.

That lack of ambition is present in the production as well. It’s a bad sign when two out of the three screenwriters have more prestigious resumes than the director, who is responsible mostly for shows like Desert Punk and both seasons of Rosario + Vampire. Like a lot of trashier fare aimed at female otaku, this series was animated by Studio Deen, and it looks no different from the rest of their mostly mediocre fare. The only exception is a short fantasy sequence where Kanade and his friends play at being giant robots that was animated by no less than noted mecha designer and animator Masami Obari. The only ambitious part of First Love Monster is its cast list. I will never understand how a low-tier show like this managed to score the likes of Yui Horie, Hikaru Midorikawa, and Ayumu Murase, just to name a few. Even a glorified cameo role like Ren-Ren is played by the likes of Shouta Aoi. Funimation’s dub could never hope to be as prestigious, but either way it’s still far better than what this show deserves.

First Love Monster is proof that shock value can only carry a production so far. All this series has going for it is its shotacon premise, and once the jolt from that wears off all you’re left with is an all-star cast going through the motions for the sake of bad comedy and an aimless romance. Even if you consider yourself a fan of trashy shoujo, there are plenty of other shows that can offer salacious romance along with some degree of competence and style. This show was rightfully panned and ignored when it premiered, and two years later it’s rightfully forgotten. Hell, were it not for the fact that I had reviewed the first volume of the manga back in the day, I might not have remembered it. First Love Monster is little more than a monstrous, distasteful waste of time.