Disaster Report: MY SISTER, MY WRITER

Is there any anime trend more regrettable than the imouto (little sister) romance?

It started off simply enough, as creators in the late 2000s sought a way to distinguish their otaku-friendly harems and rom-com light novels from the rest of the crowd.  It was the perfect fantasy for lazy, jaded otaku: here’s a cute younger girl who keeps house for you, already has an implicit relationship with you, brings an element of cultural taboo, and all of it is available without having to leave the house (or the family tree)! It soon made the shift from doujin and light novels to bargain-bin ecchi shows like Kiss X Sis and I Don’t Like You At All, Big Brother.  The closest it ever got to mainstream acceptance was 2012’s Oreimo.  Its fandom grew steadily over the course of its two seasons (plus OVAs), even as it steadily denied that it was anything like those other little sister shows (at least, until it all ended with its blood-related sibling leads literally getting married). 

Oreimo’s fall from grace was the beginning of the end of the imouto romance craze.  While little sisters continued to pop up in the harem and ecchi stories that came afterwards, the number of shows dedicated to this particular fetish declined drastically.  It’s during this fade-out that some of the worst examples from this dire subgenre appeared, such as Recently My Sister Is Unusual, A Sister’s All You Need, and what might be the last and least of its kind: 2018’s My Sister, My Writer. 

This series was late to the trend right from the start.  The author, Seiji Ebisu, made his professional light novel debut in 2014.  It was only two years afterwards that he released Ore ga Suki nano wa Imouto dakedo Imouto ja na (“The One I Love Is My Little Sister, but She’s Not My Little Sister” or ImoImo for short).  It was a bold choice to publish an incest rom-com light novel in a post-Oreimo world, especially as the scene was beginning its seismic shift towards Narou and its endless wellspring of fantasy stories.  Despite this ImoImo was a hit, stretching for thirteen volumes in total.  This meteoric success gave its publisher, Fujimi Shobo, enough confidence to announce both a manga adaptation and an anime adaptation for the series only a year after its debut, with the anime set to air in the fall of 2018. 

Perhaps they were hoping that anime audiences would respond to the most unique quality of My Sister,My Writer: its metatextual focus on the creation of light novels.  The protagonist, Yu Nagami, wants to be a light novelist but has failed to qualify for every contest he has entered. That’s quite a feat considering we’re talking about a type of literature where trite, amateurish, cliché-laden prose is the norm.  A coworker suggests that he should write an incest romance story and that he should use his own little sister Suzuka as inspiration.  Suzuka is of course the embodiment of the little sister archetype: popular, athletic, intelligent, skilled at domestic chores, and generally perfect in every way.  Her only seeming flaw is her tendency to nag at her older brother in a standoffish sort of way, but this is shown to be her merely playing the part of the tsundere to conceal her deep (if not outright troubling) love for her brother. 

This is why Yu is so surprised when Suzuka comes to him with a confession: not only did she enter the same light novel contest he just lost, but she won the grand prize on her first try with her own epic brother-sister romance.  She knows virtually nothing about the world of light novels and doesn’t want to wreck her sterling public image, so she begs Yu to pose as her (using her pen name, “Towano Chikai”) in public.  This convoluted charade only grows more complicated as Suzuka’s series becomes a national best-seller, leading more women to believe Yu is the once-in-a-lifetime talent behind this heartbreaking work of staggering incestuous genius and throw themselves at him.  This includes his sister’s editor, her hentai-brained illustrator, a couple of different tsundere rival writers (including one with a kuudere older sister in tow), and a voice actress hoping to method-act her way into the anime adaptation of “his” masterpiece.  All the while, Suzuka keeps forcing her brother into suggestive or romantic scenarios with her in the name of “research” for her books, with Yu completely oblivious to her true intentions.

You might think from this description that My Sister, My Writer is mostly concerned with Yu faking his way into success as a light novelist and you would be half-right.   He and Suzuka do have to deal with things like publishing deadlines, a trip to Comiket, and negotiating with the staff of a potential anime adaptation.  That said, most of the show is simply going through the motions of your ecchi harem anime.  More than one lady in this show introduces themselves to Yu by thrusting his hands into their breasts.  The ladies compete for his attention by dressing up in kinky cosplay in his room, go out together for the requisite beach episode, and go on a collective (and competitive) date at an amusement park.  That’s not even getting into the two-part post-series OVAs.  When it’s not about ripping off Sword Art Online’s VR gaming gimmick to force Yu into play-acting smutty scenarios via a boardgame, it’s about Suzuka using it to lead her brother through softcore porno parodies of Saw and Die Hard.

My Sister, My Writer tries (and fails) to balance out all that smut with cheap drama.  Yu spends most of the series convinced that Suzuka hates him due to some vague childhood misunderstandings stemming from the time she briefly got lost in a park as a child.  The show frames its resolution like a sweeping romantic event, beginning with a third-act misunderstanding that culminates in a big confession between the two.  Sure, it's more about Yu confessing to loving little sister moe stories instead of literally loving his sister, but it’s close enough to satisfy Suzuka’s possessive jealousy and unnatural passion while filling time in those last few episodes.

At least Suzuka fares better as a character than the rest of the harem, who remain stuck with their gimmicky, one-note archetypes to the very end.  There are no best girls to be found in this cast, although there is definitely a worst one.   That would be Suzuka’s illustrator, who goes by the ridiculous handle Ahegao Q. Double-Peace.  She looks like a Temu version of Steins;Gate’s Kurisu and virtually every word out of her mouth is something inappropriately lewd. She casually talks about her fondness for extreme and violent sexual content without asking and most of the show’s most extreme moments of fanservice come about thanks to her.  It turns out that you can in fact make a character who is too obnoxiously horny even for a bad ecchi anime.

 

Since it’s a story about making light novels written by a light novelist, one might hope that My Sister, My Writer could offer some sort of insight or commentary on the act of writing.  I guess you could say it does, but what it has to offer is the most cynical, clinical approach to creation you could imagine.  Yu is seemingly surrounded by successful teenage light novelists, but none seem to care about writing as an artform.  When they do talk shop, all they talk about are tropes and sales numbers.  To them writing a light novel is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, where it’s just a matter of assembling the right cliches in the right order for maximum otaku appeal.  I’m far from the first person to accuse light novelists of taking an industrial approach to their books, but it’s another thing to hear that sentiment straight from the author himself via his own creations!  The only character who treats writing as a form of self-expression is Suzuka.  Her books may be nothing more than a vehicle for her incestuous fantasies, but at least it’s her passion.

As bad as the story of My Sister, My Writer might be, the animation is so much worse.  Any hope of competency this show might have ever possessed disappeared at the moment Studio NAZ signed on to the production.  This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about this studio, as they were the ones who messed up the anime adaptation of DRAMAtical Murder so badly that they had to publicly apologize for it back in 2014.  Things had not gotten any better at NAZ in the meantime, but any animation studio would struggle to turn around a competently made anime in just one year’s time.  Thus, they did what any anime studio would do in this situation: farm out the work to lesser studios. 

Studio NAZ split the animation production between themselves and a brand-new studio called Magia Doraglier.  Magia Doraglier was the pet project of the show’s director, Hiroyuki Furukawa.  He was a long-time key animator and animation director who at that point was making a name for himself by helming sleezy ecchi anime like My Wife Is the Student Council President and My First Girlfriend Is a Gal.  In that sense, he was a perfect match for this kind of material.  Even so, it’s hard to say how much blame Furukawa or the staff at Studio NAZ can take for the end results.  This production got so tight on time and funds that a number of episodes were farmed out in their entirely to low-rent in-between studios, like Buyuu.  As we’ve seen before, things often go wrong when in-between studios try to move up to the big time.

 

The first sign of trouble came when the first episode’s online premiere was delayed due to “production issues.”  As early as the second episode, viewers around the world were commenting and joking on social media about its “sakuga hokai,” or animation collapse.  Even the animators were aware of it, as one of them changed their credit to the pseudonym Shojiki Komata, or “Basically we’re screwed.”  There was another one-week delay for the seventh episode before the show limped to an end after just 10 episodes.  The previously mentioned OVAs came out afterwards, as bonus discs packed in with purchase for some of the later light novel volumes.  I think that if you can’t manage a full season’s worth of anime that you have neither the right nor the luxury to waste time, effort, and money on indulgent softcore one-offs that very few people will see, but labor mismanagement is frankly the least of this show’s problems.

The animation of My Sister, My Writer falls off a cliff in much the same fashion as Homer Simpson: slowly, and then all at once while hitting every bump along the way.  It stumbles five minutes into episode one and it only goes downhill from there.  I wonder if the production team even bothered with character model sheets considering how frequently the cast goes off-model.  Faces practically melt off the screen.  Limbs and bodies contort unnaturally.  Perspective is thrown out the window, as more and more shots are tilted at a full 90 degrees.  Not even inanimate objects are exempt. 

Perhaps the most striking thing is that this show can’t even animate fanservice competently, something that most bottom-rung fanservice anime can manage.  90% of the fanservice here is a parade of flat asses, deflated boobs, and the saddest panty shots imaginable.  The remaining 10% consist of the most egregious, lovingly rendered shots of Suzuka’s scrawny, underaged body that made me wish they were as bad as the rest.  Never have I been more thankful for broadcast censorship in anime than I was while watching this show.  Once again, the only way I can begin to convey just how dire this nexus of nega-sakuga gets is with gifs of the worst examples.

My Sister, My Writer naturally ended up on every worst anime list possible in 2018, but it wasn’t your average anime failure – it was a bomb with a body count.  While Hiroyuki Furukawa has continued to work in animation, he’s not directed a single show since this one and this show would prove to be Magia Doraglier’s only project.  While Seiji Ebisu kept writing ImoImo until 2020, he’s spent the last five years struggling to keep his career as a light novelist afloat.  He’s written a few romance stories (including another incest-focused one about picking between two sisters), all of them have struggled to get beyond a couple of volumes.  Sadly, Studio NAZ was not among the victims of this show, as they are still operating to this day and would go on to bungle anime adaptations of manga like Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer and Thermae Romae. Seven years after its debut, My Sister, My Writer has not received a single physical release outside of Japan and that is highly unlikely to change.

It's tempting to read My Sister, My Writer as a bit of wishful autobiography on the part of Seiji Ebisu.  Maybe when he was just another struggling webnovelist, someone advised him to write an imouto romance.  After all, otaku love little sister stories!  So, he proceeded to take other ideas he had seen in similar stories and combined them with every fanservice scenario he could think off with the abandon of a child smashing Lego pieces together.  If we go by his own written words that’s simply how you write a story with the widest appeal as quickly as possible.  As soulless and cynical as this approach might be, it did work…for a while.  He got a bit of fame, his books in print, and nearly achieved his own multi-media franchise until it all came tumbling down. 

My Sister, My Writer wasn’t a failure just because it looked a nuclear meltdown at an animation studio or because it focused on a grody, outdated fetish.  It failed because the rot in this show runs straight into its core.  So many anime watchers will defend ecchi shows just as bad and gross as this one entirely because they find the character designs and the fanservice appealing enough to distract from any other issues it may have.  This anime couldn't even clear that hurdle so the cynicism and laziness at its heart were laid bare for all the world to see, where not even the least discerning anime perverts could overlook it.  In that sense, My Sister, My Writer is also something of a cautionary tale.  It’s proof that treating a story like a product to be assembled and sold to an audience of the lowest common denominator of taste is a tactic that works only for so long.  Eventually that creative bankruptcy will catch up to its creators, and all they can hope for is that their failure will not be as spectacular or as notorious as this one.