We, The Animasochists, in order to shatter nostalgia goggles, rip open old scabs, rant and bitch, provide for the public disdain, make a futile attempt to prevent history from repeating itself, and secure the curses of poorly-aged anime to ourselves and our readers, do ordain and establish this article for The Animasochists.




Welcome to the 2013 Throwback Slaines. It’s been a while since we’ve managed to get one of these out when we expected to, hasn’t it? We blame reality, as it’s obviously the worst anime of all time. We’ve tried to curb our… “enthusiasm” is definitely not the right word for this, but we’ve tried to rein in the length of the article this time. Whether or not we succeeded would be an exercise for the reader, except the readers are also mob characters in this shit anime. Sorry to burst your collective bubble.



So how bad was anime in 2013? Pretty bad, it turns out. As usual, there were plenty of good and fun shows, and as usual, we have subjected ourselves to the rest of them. So buckle up and wipe down those rose-tinted glasses, we’re about to show you why normal sunglasses are tinted brown instead.




One last thing before we begin: Happy Halloween! We brought ghosts, vampires, chainsaw murderers, miscellaneous serial killers, and perhaps the scariest of all, incest.



***SPOILER ALERT***



***NON-SERIOUS POST ALERT***


Loser: Suisei no Gargantia - Love him or hate him, Gen Urobuchi was hot shit in the years preceding Gargantia. After Madoka Magica, Fate/Zero, and Psycho-Pass one after the other, everyone was hyped as hell to see his take on a mecha show. The production values were through the roof and we were given a world of seafaring ship-cities.




So how the hell did they fuck it up so badly?! This show started off with so much promise, then it utterly shit the bed: stupid, skeevy characters, ALIENS *hand gestures*, and a mecha that really didn’t even fucking matter. It was the end of the Urobutcher’s hot streak, leading to Aldnoah.Zero next year.

Dishonorable Mentions:


Coppelion - Originally announced in 2010, this anime adaptation of a 2008 manga was delayed due to a major plot twist in the worst anime of all time, Real Life. An actual nuclear disaster in Japan ended up causing this disaster anime about a fictional nuclear meltdown to be delayed for three years. You would think having to wait so long means it’s a graphic, gut-wrenching depiction of the horrors of a nuclear accident, right? No! It’s fucking boring! How do you make a disaster show boring?! Even the color palette sucks! It’s all washed out like the picture above.




Flowers of Evil - Based off a very well-received manga, everyone who was anticipating a really good horror thriller anime to watch weekly was sucker-punched by the opening episode and its suspect animation choices (see adaptation below), But even with bad and baffling choices that were specifically asked for by the original author, we could still get the story we loved, right? Well, no, because they also decided to slow the pacing to an absolute crawl. Even if this was animated well, the story would still have been the worst thing an anime could be: EXTREMELY BORING.




Wanna Be The Strongest! - Speaking of boring, how the fuck did you make a show about FEMALE IDOLS DOING PRO-WRESTLING boring?! You went all-in on PLOT and completely scrapped the actual plot, and you were STILL unable to hold anyone’s attention. How could boobs let us down this badly?




Beyond the Boundary - A KyoAni show that was all style and no substance, BtB went pretty much nowhere important with its cast and setting, both of which had obvious potential. What a waste.


The World God Only Knows - Goddess Arc - This season was such a shitshow that the rest of the manga didn’t get adapted. (Though it’s probably for the best, as the actual ending was rushed to Hell and back, literally.)


Loser: Infinite Stratos 2 - Pro tip for adapting a light novel: Make sure an entire season’s worth of content exists before you start production. IS2 was plagued with atrocious filler and even worse writing and costume design, with the entire second half being a gigantic crock of shit made up by the studio with basically no input from the author, since he was on a multi-year hiatus. Said hiatus only ended after this season had ended, and he likely only got back into it because of how horribly it was executed and/or received. We just hope he went back to it out of spite for the studio fucking up his series, and not out of fear for his life from rabid, angry fans.


Dishonorable Mentions:

OreImo 2 - Who asked for this? Who wanted to see more of Kyosuke stumbling his way into awful incestuous situations with his younger sister, and can we purge them? The first season of OreImo was a recipe in tedium and, though it tried to play everything off as funny, was ultimately straight-up bad. Watching the first season, we knew where things would eventually go; we didn’t need a second season to tell us that. But, nonetheless, here we are. The fact that it was popular enough to get a second season is less an indication of how bad the show is, though, and more indicative of its fans. We know your tags, OreImo stans, but we wish we didn’t.


Symphogear G - While it tries to build on the obvious problem caused by the partial success at the end of season 1, the second season of Symphogear also took an awful lot of the sacrifices and character development of the first season and either made them irrelevant, fully reversed them, or just threw them out the window entirely. We don’t understand how they had to do so many retcons later when they obviously knew a lot of where the series was going next; there are names dropped here that show they had at least some level of planning for all 3 future seasons. What the hell happened?




Loser:.Samurai Flamenco - This show continues to escalate its stakes as it goes along. Every 5-6 episodes it jumps to an entirely different kind of superhero fiction, from a powerless vigilante to becoming Super Sentai Haruhi Suzumiya. By episode 18 our protagonist, Masayoshi Hazama, has effectively broken through reality to get to this point. He ends up meeting god after battling the show’s final villain (by turning into a giant robot and fighting on the moon), and is informed that all of the supervillains and aliens that attacked him and his allies up until this point were created from his subconscious mind so he could be a better hero. Great ending, right? …Yeah, after taking the show to that logical extreme, it turns out we still have 4 episodes to go.




The final stretch of the show introduces a new, more serious villain that is just a normal guy with a joker complex who goes around harming Masayoshi’s friends and superhero allies, Including poisoning two girls who were barely involved with him, just to fuck with him. On top of all this, the show heavily retcons that the only sane character, Masayoshi’s friend and local police officer Hidenori Goto, has been going crazy the entire series due to his girlfriend going missing (which is literally only revealed in episode 19). After kidnapping Goto and deleting all his girlfriend’s texts to get a rise of him, the new villain tries to commit Suicide By Cop/Flamenco, but instead Masayoshi strips naked and everything turns out fine. (Yes, really.)


Dishonorable Mentions:

OreImo 2 - He marries his little sister. Yes, really. We really, really wish we didn’t see this ending coming. We saw this ending coming. It didn’t make it any better; instead, it was like watching the countdown timer on a bomb. Except the bomb explodes into incest. *shudders* The only silver lining is that every other girl deserved better than him anyway.




Golden Time - Amnesia. Amnesia? Amnesia! NTR. NTR? NTR! Yes you can see where this is going. Good old amnesia for the win, just to make sure one girl won the relationship over another, to bring this otherwise almost-charming romance to an absolute mess of an ending.



Beyond the Boundary - It was almost good. It was almost thought-provoking. Hell, it was almost an actual ending. But no, the last episode and a half was a ridiculous cocktail of dream sequences, takesy-backsies, and bullshit cop-outs, shaken, on the rocks, and then rushed to a terrible, choppy finish. KyoAni, you are a shitty bartender.




Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet - You thought it was your boss from the space mecha military, but it was me, his mecha’s AI! And then aliens. Because it’s always aliens. And this isn’t even a Trigger show… Hell, this ending was so aggravating that the planned second season got outright cancelled after it had been announced.



Strike the Blood - If you’re going to drop a sequel hook this blatant, make sure you’re actually getting a sequel (or at least a sequel that isn’t OVAs that are never getting a western release). The main character’s daughters from the future (from several different mothers) show up to investigate the death of their father, who is currently very much alive. Much confusion is shared by the characters and the viewers.





Loser:.Flowers of Evil - What the hell were they thinking?! The manga featured incredibly creepy and intense scenes between Takao Kasuga and the manipulative blackmailing nihilist Sawa Nakamura. The anime went for an entirely different kind of horror by delving into UNCANNY VALLEY ROTOSCOPING OH GOD WHY.




The worst part is that the manga looked completely normal, like any other manga. Why was this necessary? Also, instead of leaving the show on a sequel hook or read-the-manga ending, they decided to do a montage, including a traumatic rape scene, and called it a day. This anime showed utter contempt for anyone who even tried to watch it.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Da Capo III - The Da Capo series is known for many things: androids that eat bananas, girlfriends that read minds, cherry blossoms that bestow magical powers, and the main character trying to bang his sister. One thing it will never be accused of is actually coming close to displaying any of this batshit craziness in an adaptation. Instead, it flip-flops along through a tiny fraction of the sprawling, batshit craziness that is the time-travel story of Da Capo III’s source material (an inevitability when adapting a >40 hour long visual novel as a paltry thirteen episodes). Fully letting itself go, it steeps itself completely in harem hijinks, managing to officially jump the animated Da Capo shark, which to date has limped along at least trying to service its source material.




On the plus side, you’ll still need push pins, string, and a penchant for conspiracy theory bulletin boards to keep up with everything that happens. At least they still got that right.



The only thing that got butchered worse than Ronaldo was the plot itself.


Devil Survivor 2 - The video game this anime was based on had 3 branching paths, as is normal for the SMT series: Law, Chaos, and Neutral. Each has several paired NPCs that serve as redundant solutions for specific issues in the overall plot, and while permadeath is a thing in certain situations, the game won’t actually let you kill both NPCs that serve a particular function in the story. Of course, most players went for perfect runs, so there’s no way an anime adaptation would kill so many of these precious characters, right?



HAHAHAHAHAHA FUCK YOU. The anime killed almost every matched pair, slaughtered the entirety of the Chaos faction, went completely off the rails of the Law route, and ended up focusing more on a not-very-subtle and almost completely anime-original BL relationship between the protag and the Law route’s leader. (Neutral path? What’s that? Its leader barely got three lines in the show, despite being mission-critical in all three paths.)




Infinite Stratos 2 - The season was something of a Hail Mary. The light novel was on hiatus when S2 began, and the next volume didn’t end up coming out until just weeks after it ended. This left them floundering with nothing to do but make egregious filler, with the girls in ridiculous outfits (even by the series’ standards) and completely nonsensical and unimportant plots - all while more pressing problems were waiting on a resolution. It was a total shitshow.



DanganRonpa - We come across this problem time and time again when adapting games and especially visual novels: too much story for a 12-13 episode series. You’d be forgiven for thinking that DanganRonpa isn’t that bad… for the first 2/3rds. The show then compresses a good 50% of the material into the final 4 episodes, cutting out a whole bunch of foreshadowing for the show’s final twists.




Arpeggio of Blue Steel - The manga - and presumably the LN, which has not been translated into English - had an entire secondary cast, running out of a “normal” (read: not a hypertech alien shipgirl) submarine following along the main cast. The anime cut them out entirely. The protagonist’s ex was aboard that submarine, and she got reduced to all of maybe a few moments of mention at the very beginning before disappearing entirely.




Loser-est: Vividred Operation - Magical girl transformation scenes are what they are. We get it, it’s been going on for ages. But most of them are handwaved as happening instantaneously, or at least they do it out of sight of other people to maintain a (flimsy) secret identity. But these poor girls’ magical devices were created by the scum of the earth, a pervy geriatric mad scientist who is broadcasting their nudity into military control rooms.




The thing that sets Vividred apart from most other fanservice is that every single creepshot is IN-UNIVERSE. Their cameraman is an unabashed, incestuous voyeur broadcasting his middle-school granddaughter and her best friends on big screens.




While he had multiple warrants out for his arrest even before the broadcasts, the government is looking the other way until the world is no longer in imminent danger of total destruction. We wonder if that world is worth saving.




Loser-er: Blood Lad - Most of the fanservice in this show is focused on two characters: Fuyumi, shown above, and Bell, shown below. To answer why she’s suddenly naked: it’s because she just fucking died, having been eaten by a piranha plant. If you thought her dying in the first episode would mean the creators wouldn’t get her naked as much as possible, you’d be dead wrong.




And then there’s Bell, who moonlights as a teleporting thief who for some reason becomes separated from her clothing only when Staz the protagonist gets involved. After the first time it happens, it’s hard to tell if she’s just doing it on purpose to tease him.




Loser: NouCome - A show whose primary gimmick has the main character forced by a cruel god to frequently choose between various ridiculous choices would seem a natural setting for ecchi hijinks, but this show goes above and beyond in unfortunate ways. Outstanding examples primarily come from a character whose primary character trait is ‘boobs,’ which the show seems to think is brilliant comedy:




But the most egregious is Chocolat, a character (yes, that’s her name) who exists solely for the sake of panty shots and banana-betwixt-the-boobs style humor. Did we mention that at one point she acts like the MCs dog? Yeah. This show doesn’t just have no shame, it hasn’t even heard of the concept of shame.


Dishonorable Mentions:


Strike the Blood - Like many other harem light novel adaptations, it had to find something to set it apart from the pack. Unfortunately, Strike the Blood decided that its distinguishing factor should be smut.




Infinite Stratos 2 - This season started with swimsuits and steadily got less and less respectful from there.




They should’ve renamed it Infinite Mantle, cause it nosedived so hard it went thousands of miles underground.




Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet - What.




The hell.




Is this SHIT. These girls are all varying levels of underage, and this is merely the worst of the fanservice scenes involving them.




The Hentai Prince and the Stony Cat - Yeah we know it has hentai in the goddamn title but this show isn’t actually a hentai so we’re still complaining. The girls are frequently in distressing states of undress, and if they didn’t tell you they were between 15~18 years of age, you wouldn’t think so from watching.




Symphogear G - We’ve seen eno No, we’re not going to dignify this with that meme. What should be a silly magical girl show with over-the-top special effects and a mostly nonsensical but highly emotional plot is severely marred by egregious creepshots. It’s not the first time the series drops long character development scenes in the shower, but previously those showers had privacy screens rather than being OPEN PRISON SHOWERS.


Hell, Maria’s hairstyle is the way it is for no other reason than to allow full-frontal shots without actually increasing the show’s age rating. Also, Chris gets naked and continues fighting, jumping around in her birthday suit, for absolutely no reason. LITERALLY no reason, because she simply re-materializes her outfit after a few minutes, with absolutely no explanation as to why any of it happened or why she stayed that way for that long.




Devil Survivor 2 - The show actually threw out the entire plot of the game just to ship these two. It’s ‘fan service’ at the cost of any semblance of coherence.




Loser-est: CFW Trick (Hyperdimension Neptunia) - Supposedly this robotic clown is the incarnation of scrub gamer rage when they can’t beat a game,.meaning he’s supposed to be the Dark Souls of villains. But what the fuck does that have to do with being a creepy pedophile who molests little girls with an extendable, prehensile tongue? (...Please, for all our sakes, don’t answer that.)




Loser-er: Kenjirou Isshiki (Vividred Operation) - Some degree of child endangerment is expected in any magical girl series. But there’s a certain point where the things you subject your young saviors to are just beyond the pale. Kenjirou looked at that line, giggled like a schoolgirl, strapped a jetpack to his granddaughter, and blasted her across it. (Then he turned himself into a hamster for reasons we can only dread.)




For starters, pretty much the entire plot premise is strongly implied to have been accidental fallout from his previous inventions fucking with the dimensional boundaries. When everything goes to shit, he develops (or has been developing for a long time) a set of transformative gear for his middle-school granddaughter and her paraplegic best friend, which is deliberately exhibitionary and EXTREMELY UNCOMFORTABLE TO WATCH.




He’s also actually the cameraman of the anime, as quite often our view of the butts battles is through his computer screen - where he’s got a live feed of the girls getting stripped, harassed, and molested by the monsters of the week. It also doesn’t help that he gleefully produces new suits on the spot for the terrified hikkikomori and the sporty prude. It’s unclear whether they were ready and waiting or if he is still making horrible new things even in rodent form. Either way, he’s vermin inside and out.




Loser: Q-vier (Valvrave) - Valvrave is a dumping ground for hilariously over-the-top cliches and stock character archetypes, but none more so than good ol’ Q-vier. This kill-crazy member of the infamous germanically-numbered Dorssian barbershop quartet has an empathy level only matched by the size of his one-dimensional personality. When he’s not killing a character, he’s imagining killing a character or complaining about not killing a character. While most of the cast, through one forced reason or another, goes through some kind of character development (that is, developing from a one-dimensional joke into a one-and-half-dimensional bigger joke), Q-vier is just one joke right up until his end... at the hands of a member of his quartet. Shocking betrayal! Although not as shocking of a betrayal as including such a simple psychopath as a major character.


Dishonorable Mentions:


Hiroomi Nase (Beyond the Boundary) - A creepy siscon who makes constant passes at his underage sister even as he mocks his supposed best friend for a glasses fetish, Hiroomi is a dickweed at the best of times. His obsessive overprotectiveness takes it up to eleven, and even then we’re not seeing the full picture. There’s a character song album included in the physical release of the show that features Hiroomi and Akihito (the protagonist) each singing their own song, and then a duet.The duet is called Welcome To The World, wherein both of them sing about their respective fetishes, simultaneously mocking and trying to convert each other, before effectively turning to the listener and going “And if any of that sounded hot, welcome to our world, you’re a pervert too.” It’s pretty bad, but then it gets worse: Ol’ Nasty Nase’s song is called Cage For Love, where he basically describes how he wants to keep his sister tied up in a display case forever. You can fuck right off, Hiroomi.



Every Male Character (Diabolik Lovers) - Most of these guys are real winners, with their weird-as-fuck hobbies and “affections” towards Yui. We have a verbally-abusive and overly-possessive BSDM enthusiast, an apathetic and lazy pervert, a poison-loving sadist, a forceful pervert who loves teasing Yui, and an insecure yandere who keeps his mother’s ashes inside a teddy bear. The last love interest is almost decent; while indifferent to Yui, he helps her adjust to the home, as well as assisting some of her escape attempts because he feels that she shouldn’t be in a place that’s so dangerous. If he’d actually cared about her beyond vague conscience twinges or actually succeeded in helping her escape, he might’ve dodged this list. But since she couldn’t escape, neither does he.




The Ghost of Banri Past (Golden Time) - One of the major plot points is that Banri begins the show with amnesia after a serious accident wherein he fell off a bridge. He misses his college entrance exam and a year of school due to hospitalization and forgets his old life. But once he does get into college, he falls in love with his new best friend’s abusive girlfriend - at which point the ghost of his previous memories shows up to complain. Yes, really. Only he can see it, and rather than actually remembering any of the shit his ghost is bitching about, such as forgetting his previous girlfriend, the ghost has to actually tell him shit out loud, conveying only verbal information. What kind of godawful plot device is this? We know amnesia is never done well in anime, but Bitchy Amnesia Ghost takes things to a whole new nadir.



Pinion (Gargantia of the Verdurous Planet) - Due to his hatred of the alien squid people he takes child soldier and protagonist Ledo to go and work on genociding as many of them as he can so he can steal their rare artifacts for power and wealth (note: His hatred stems from the fact his brother died doing the exact same thing). After It’s revealed that the Aliens are evolved humanity (because of course they are) He still murders as many of them as he can and then forms his own rival fleet and rebellion group with the antagonistic pirate faction




On top of all this he’s a creepy, irrationally jealous, possibly pedophilic, abusive pervert who is somehow still allowed anywhere near any of the women on the ship. Also, he wears horrifically unfashionable suspenders.




Loser-est: Kirihime Natsuno (Dog & Scissors) - Look, let’s get straight to the point with Kirihime: she spends half the show torturing her newly acquired pet dog. No one likes it when you hurt the dog!




But to get into more detail about her, Kirihime is the real name of famous writer Shinobu Akiyama, which means the entire plot revolves around her. From being the best writer in Japan, able to churn out enough manuscript to give Kazuma Kamachi a run for his money, to also being a world-class combatant who is so good at fighting with a pair of scissors that she can even block MOTHERFUCKING BAZOOKA ROUNDS.


Now, let’s get back to the eponymous dog from the show’s title. Kazuhito used to be a human boy, but he was murdered while protecting Kirihime from a crazed fan. So when he’s reincarnated as a dog - and this was before everything was an isekai, so this is somehow reality - his thoughts are beamed into Kirihime’s head, and her first instinct is to track him down, then threaten the pet shop owner until he sells her the dog. When she gets him home, she strings him up and wants to kill him for the crime of being too loud in her head.




Once she finds out he’s the guy that saved her life, she turns into a tsundere and falls in love with Kazuhito. She doesn’t even care that he’s a dog and wants him to bang her. Of course, because Kazuhito is a fucking dog - and even before he died he had no interest in real girls - he turns her down at every chance he gets, which results in more torture for himself. But since his thoughts are involuntarily sent to her, and she puts a pet GPS tracking chip in him, he really can’t get away from her. We hate it when pets get cruel treatment anyway, but this goes above and beyond.




Loser-er: Sawa Nakamura (Flowers of Evil) - After catching Kasuga stealing gym clothes of the girl he’s fallen in love with, she decides to make his life an absolute hell. Nakamura just wants to see the world burn… or failing that, see Kasuga burn. She abuses him episode after episode, including forcing him to wear the aforementioned stolen gym clothes on a date under his clothing and then dumping a bucket of water on him to reveal himself to her. Whether it be through her blackmail and manipulation of Kasuga or her own profanity-laden, nihilistic rants, she is a vacuum for all positive emotions, including those of the viewers watching this.




Loser: Shouko (Valvrave) - Shouko is our lead Haruto’s love interest for most of the first half of Valvrave. She successfully leads an independence movement amongst the students in their school on the admittedly solid arguments of “fuck this shit I’m out” and “we have the giant superpowered mecha.” Of course, she couldn’t have done any of this without said powerful mechas (the titular Valvraves) and their student pilots, including Haruto and several of her friends.




What she doesn’t know is that in order to pilot these mechas, each of the people protecting the Module they live in from space nazis had to become space vampires, and when this fact is revealed to her she swiftly throws all of the Valvrave pilots under a space bus - and promptly gets a massive portion of the student body massacred because they no longer had anyone protecting them.




After all this is through and several of the pilots (including Haruto) die while still trying to protect them, she eventually sees the error of her ways and decides to step down from power to live out the rest of her days atoning for her absolutely massive fuck up.... except she actually does NONE of that, and instead becomes a space vampire herself to become the new pilot of Haruto’s now-vacant Valvrave.

Dishonorable Mentions:


Junko (DanganRonpa) - After appearing to be dead for the majority of the show, she turns up as the final villain, having faked her death by murdering her twin sister. It’s then revealed that she instigated global rioting, mass suicides and the collapse of practically all society, just because she’s in love with the concept of despair.



She’s so fond of despair, and absolutely batshit insane, that in the final trial of the game when she loses the battle between “Hope” and “Despair,” she gladly accepts the final, most grueling punishment possible - which is to be subjected to every single torture-to-death method the previous (and very dead) characters went through.




Mari Maya (Samurai Flamenco) - Not content with being a composer, lyricist, and main star of an idol trio, Mari decides to try out being a magical girl, eventually dragging the other two members of her trio into being fellow magical girl vigilantes. Unlike the titular hero, Mari is effective at taking down street level criminals with brutal tactics, up to and including stomping on their balls after she’s taken them down.



When actually dangerous villains start turning up, she and her whole idol squad are kidnapped and tortured, and Mari ends up with PTSD for most of the show afterwards. And yet, somehow she continues being selfish, petty, and threatening to kill herself if the police officer she has a crush on doesn’t let her hide in his apartment. Oh, and she also goes into hiding because one of the girls in her trio makes her feel inferior and she wants to avoid her.




Shiina Mashiro (Pet Girl of Sakurasou) - She was so one-dimensional even 2D-kun wouldn’t want her. As the female lead, she falls utterly flat at every opportunity.



Kurumi (Date A Live) - Who thought it’d be a good idea to make one of the main characters a slutty, sadistic gothic lolita, dual wielding guns, whose abilities are making infinite clones, dark magic, teleportation, and time manipulation? As if that wasn’t bad enough, she turns back and forth from heel to face so fast and so often that she could pass for a perpetual motion machine. Kurumi is a fan favorite among the degenerates who actually enjoy this series, but we’d like to warn you again: don’t stick your dick in crazy,




Natsume Tsuchimikado (Tokyo Ravens) - She might’ve been a halfway decent heroine if not for the whole “sending an inherently doomed but unaware human-shaped familiar to be the protagonist’s childhood friend and fall in love with him” thing. That’s kind of a dick move even before lying to him about for almost the entire run of the show.




Loser: The Council of 101 (Valvrave) - The central antagonist of Valvrave is the super-secret Council of 101. Leaving aside the hyper-generic naming scheme of this organization, the council is actually made up of aliens called Magius... that arrived on Earth hundreds of years ago... that feed off of humans... that meet in a super-secret facility surrounded by waterfalls? Fuck it, they’re space vampires. Valvrave’s villains are a secret society of space vampires. Also, some of the prominent Magius are Dorssians, which are basically Nazis (their leader is a Führer, we’re not joking). So a bunch of them are also Nazi Space Vampires. A secret society of Nazi Space Vampires that control the world by standing around a room menacingly. The drive to keep this insane secret is the focal point of the entire show, and all it takes to unravel is a bunch of high school space vampires and L-Elf with a pastebin account. Played up as a giant villain, they fall within two seasons.


Dishonorable Mentions:

Humanity (Shinsekai Yori) - Due to developing human’s developing psychic powers in the future, a power limiter is forced on them that prevents them from harming other humans. The supposedly primary villains of Shinsekai Yori are walking, talking naked molerats who, towards the end of the show, have begun to wage war on humanity. Their leader, Squealer, by this point has already kidnapped two of the main characters and forced them to conceive a monstrous child who is able to kill indiscriminately, due to not having the aforementioned limiter, while other humans are powerless to stop her. You would think this act of evil would put him as the most despicable piece of shit in the show, but only until he is defeated and captured by human forces.


That’s when they subject him to an endless torture where his body is broken down and then allowed to regenerate, repeatedly, for the rest of his life. But the real kicker is that Squealer and the rest of his race are revealed to have originally been humans that did not develop the powers that humanity now has access to, and were genetically altered so they could be treated as a slave race. Holy fuck.

God (Sunday Without God) - What if God was one of us a deadbeat dad who walked out on the entire world? Well, then you’re left with an entire society of people unable to die, even when they’re rotting away inside and out. It’s a rough deal, but thankfully he did leave our protagonist Ai with the ability to help people pass on. Oh, she’s also a 12 year old girl who grew up in a town where everyone around her was one of the living dead, and then had to put her own father down. THANKS DAD GOD.


Beyond Flamenco (Samurai Flamenco) - So you’re a space alien that is a doppelganger of the main character and you’re also the mouthpiece for a group of alien invasion. You think that you could formulate a better plan than sending kaiju down to earth to cause trouble for all the new heroes. So what do you do next? Why, that’s obvious! You and your entire alien space force commit simultaneous suicide and give up. Perhaps they were banking on the fact they had already planted a doomsday device that was going to erase Japan from the planet, but they apparently couldn’t be bothered to see it through to the end.


John Wayne Vercingetorix (Symphogear G) - Yes, that’s really his name. He’s a horrible mix of a Bad Touch Doctor, a drug dealer, a pathetic manchild, an eternal chuuni, and a wannabe hero with delusions of grandeur. Over the course of the show, (*deep breath*) he deliberately misleads Maria, Kirika, and Shirabe into villainy (in order to defeat them himself later to be hailed as a savior), fuses his arm with an evil Relic in an attempt to become a superhero, gives all three antiheroines a crippling addiction to Symphogear Relic Performance Enhancing Drugs, forcibly pumps the main heroine’s girlfriend full of said drugs to turn her into a mindless fighting machine, backstabs absolutely every person that works with him at any point in time, and abandons the world to its supposedly-inevitable destruction in order to “repopulate” it as he pleases. Did we mention he’s a gross creeper?




Also, all of his plans are total bullshit - in both the “that’s not how that works, that’s not how any of this works” way AND the “he was fucking lying about both the methods and the motivations behind each and every step of this plan” way.



Nanamine Tooru (Bakuman S3) - In Bakuman’s 3rd season, a new challenger to our manga-creating duo finally emerges: this douchecake. It’s revealed that instead of working on his own, publishing manga like any true creator does, Nanamine instead outsources his work to people on the internet to feed him ideas and draw his work which he then passes on as his own. This quickly deteriorates, as you would expect, but what ends up happening to him in the end? Nothing more than a simple, “You lost, now you should do it the proper way!” and he never has to truly deal with what the real life consequences of this plagiarism would really be like. He’s also funneled off and never seen again, so really, this was all just a waste of time for everyone.



Loser-est: Hibiki Tachibana (Symphogear G) - You know how Kanade died at the beginning of Season 1 by using her Swan Song as a heroic sacrifice? You know how it’s impossible to stop singing one of those once you’ve started? Hibiki stops multiple instances of people trying to do the same using the Power of Bullshit Friendship, by channeling the energy into herself, then venting it in a technicolor tornado. She can do this regardless of whether or not you actually want her to stop your song. But we already sort of knew that, so it’s small potatoes compared to the bullshit that happens halfway through the season.




See, Hibiki has a rare and dangerous case of Magical Malignant Symphogear Cancer. You would normally think this is a problem, but it makes her more overpowered than ever. At one point in the show, she got her arm bitten off just below the shoulder by Ver’s pet Nephilim. (It was very gory.)




(Un?)fortunately, the Gungnir assimilating into her had its own self-preservation instinct - so when Hibiki starts to faint from the pain and shock, it takes over. She goes absolutely fucking apeshit; grows sinister black energy from Gungnir’s scar, the black energy REGROWS HER ARM, and she roidrages into a bestial berserk mode. And then things get worse.




She beats the absolute piss out of the freshly-evolved beast that just chewed up and swallowed her fist weapon for its relic power. Dr. Ver rightly freaks out himself, summoning a large Noise, and she leaps into its mouth to pummel it from the inside until it bursts into a pile of ash. Then she whips her head around to the fleeing Nephilim, leaps into the air, breaks its spine as she lands on it, plunges her arm into its chest, and rips its fucking heart out. She tosses it behind her disinterestedly, then leaps into the air again, manifests the spear of Gungnir that she’s never been able to actually call on before, jabs it into the same hole, and explodes the Nephilim into a nasty pile of giblets. And once her friends calm her down and she reverts, her arm and uniform sleeve are fully intact.




The Yuri Sex Laser giving her demigod powers was only retconned in later. Yes, really. As of this season, it “only” fully cured her Symphogear Cancer. At the end, she also stole back the piece of Gungnir that Maria stole first, so she doesn’t even lose her weapon.


Loser-er: Izayoi Sakamaki (Problem Children Are Coming From Another World, Aren’t They?) - When your very first act upon being isekai’d is to punch a god to death before even receiving any powers, something has gone horribly wrong. The two female protagonists get the standard shounen battle anime power progression. He starts off being a godslayer and proceeds to basically sleepwalk through the plot, so bored that he turns to sexually harassing a bunny-girl simply to prevent himself from getting bored enough with the entire planet to just blow it up.


Loser: Akihito Kanbara (Beyond the Boundary) - What’s more powerful than being fucking immortal? Well, it turns out that if you can get past his immortality - and let’s be real, most settings that have immortality have ways to get around it - he’s actually got an insane, unstoppable eldritch horror sealed inside him. Whoops. Turns out just leaving the awkward, doofy immortal kid alone (like he incessantly asked for) really was the best plan all along, you morons.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Hero (Maoyuu) - This dude is literally a Dragon Quest Hero with postgame stats and equipment. He basically sits out most of the plot because it’s a trade war and a political quagmire, waiting for someone to declare actual war so he can just walk up and Gigaslash them off the face of the earth. Also, he’s on a steady course for an actual, overt harem ending.




Kojou Akatsuki (Strike The Blood) - How OP is this motherfucker? Well, he’s become a Pureblood Vampire Progenitor despite being born a mortal, is one of the 3~5 most powerful beings in existence because of this, has killed the previous Pureblood Vampire Progenitor offscreen before the show started, has made pacts with multiple top-ranked magical spirits, has a harem consisting of both muggles and mages… Yep, bingo! That’s a full line. What did he win? ...Well, he won his daughters from the future travelling through time to undo his future death, which is worth at least two more spots on the board somewhere.



Erza Scarlet (Fairy Tail) - All the characters in the fairy tail guild are pretty damn Overpowered, you have fire dragon slayer Natsu, Icemancer Grey and Lucy whose power is so high her clothes barely contain it. But towards the end of the first season, there is a 7 year timeskip where half the guild is frozen in stasis, after which they go through a training montage to unlock a secret technique to get powerful enough to enter the show’s tournament arc. The only character who doesn’t need to go through this painful training is Erza Scarlet, who proceeds to absolutely destroy the entire tournament, singlehandedly, not allowing anyone else to get even a single point. That’s right, she was frozen for 7 fucking years and still was too powerful for anyone else to deal with, without any further training. (She gets that powerup in season 2 anyway, midfight, with no explanation.)





Loser: Walkure Romanze - Aw, horsefeathers. Walkure Romanze is pretty standard romance VN adaption, give or take the setting being a school for knights where jousting is the main pastime. It has a harem of ostensibly intelligent ladies all inexplicably attracted to the undeserving MC, a former jouster who took an arrow to the knee and is now just an assistant to other knights called a begleiter. There’s a childhood friend, a high class rich girl, a tsundere etc etc. All stuff we’ve seen a million times before, right up until the end. The girls ask who he wants to pick, and faced with the choice of hooking up with any one of these attractive, rich noble ladies, our boy Takahiro… bails and chooses his horse.


HE. CHOOSES. THE. GODDAMNED. HORSES. Oh no, beautiful women who wish to lavish me with sexual favors, I must go to my equine love! What the actual fuck, Takahiro.




Dishonorable Mentions:

Golden Time - Literally every relationship here is bullshit. Thanks amnesia, you fucked everything up again. Why? You had actual solid relationships here (after a little too much trauma and bullshit, but hey...) and then you had to throw in this nonsense just to cause drama and mess in a story that didn’t need it. Once more, for those in the back: BOOOOOOOO.


Diabolik Lovers - Diabolik Lovers is a typical otome visual novel adaptation about a high schooler named Yui Komori who moves into a house full of hot, handsome and blood-thirsty vampires. The anime does introduce each of the “love interests” from the game as well as a brief look into the relationships with Yui. Unfortunately, most of them are either physically or mentally abusive towards her, to the extent of trying to make her braindead, real-dead, or worse. Five of the six “love interests” in the house try to make her their slave and/or blood-bag throughout the story without much consideration for her feelings, and at the end it’s implied she will eventually tie the knot with the BDSM enthusiast, both literally and figuratively.



We would have covered this shitshow in more detail, but another author at AniTAY, who makes the dubious claim that he is not an Animasochist, has written a scathing report of all the ways Diabolik Lovers shits the bed.




Haganai Next - The entire plot of this harem show and its previous season is all buildup into the main character actually making a choice of who he likes. Unlike other harem shows, this one really drills down into “Well, the main character has to make a choice here. This is not sustainable, these girls can’t all realistically stay friends like this forever.” And after finally being confronted and being faced with these facts, what happens? The second-worst possibility after “he picks the horse”: he chooses nobody, specifically so everyone can stay friends. And literally every girl is disappointed in this, so instead of staying friends, it ruins their relationships with each other, just like you would expect. Good job breaking it, hero.




Pet Girl of Sakurasou - If you treat your girlfriend as a pet and act like a douchebag to her, is it domestic abuse or cruelty to animals? (Por que no los dos?)



Hentai Prince - Due to making a wish with a jerkass cat genie, the massive pervert Yuto has his memories of two of his three harem members constantly erased. This really puts a humongous road block into his romantic prospects with any of the girls. However, that isn’t the only thing that causes his relationships to be muddied; see the entry in Squick below.





Loser-est: Sasami-san@ganbaranai - Right from the get go, Sasami-san@Ganbaranai has a major incest problem. This is made painfully clear multiple times throughout the course of the show. Not only is this potential pairing actually integral to the plot, but incest is a multi-generational tradition within her lineage! Buckle up, because it’s only downhill from here.




Sasami has inherited the power of Amaterasu, and her entire bloodline has used incest as a way to keep the power pure. Sasami’s weak constitution and poor health are a direct result of this, and she’s expected to continue the tradition by making babies with a close relative. When Sasami learns of this, she is understandably upset, but not for the reasons one would expect. Oooooh no - she is upset that the random sperm donor from within the family that her mother wants her to bump uglies with is not her brother. That’s right, if she’s going to do incest, a distant cousin won’t do. She wants her closest relative to father her future horribly deformed children. Jesus fucking Christ!




Also, this character exists. The less said about them, the better.


Loser-er: OreImo 2 - OreImo probably wants the relationship between Kyousuke and Kirino to be some grand gesture about how “love comes in all forms” or “love runs deeper than blood” or something equally saccharine. And, sure, those sentiments are probably true in some contexts. But not with fucking i n c e s t. How many times do we have to say it? Don’t fuck your sister, don’t marry your sister, just don’t. The way the show plays with going back and forth on whether Kyosuke and Kirino will actually get together is infuriating because we know what the end result will be. The fact that the road there is paved with misunderstandings, lewd interactions between these siblings, and just generally uncomfortable dialogue laden with innuendo and sexual undertones leaves the worst of bad tastes in our mouth. Moreover, the show also struggles with taking their relationship all the way despite how, as we’ve said before, we all know where it’s going. It’s just a bunch of PG-13 “shenanigans” that left us uncomfortable, unaroused, and unimpressed. Just watch hentai if you want incest with “payoff”. Thanks in significant part to OreImo fans, there’s plenty of it.




Loser: Brothers Conflict - When single father Rintarou went looking for a new family member, his daughter Ema soon learned he would be marrying Miwa Asahina, a wealthy fashion designer. In order to give them some space, she moves into the Sunrise Residence with her new step-brothers. While she slowly gets to know each of her 13 new step-brothers, from the youngest Wataru (10) to the oldest Masaomi (31), each of them also slowly starts to fall in love with Ema - and not in a brotherly fashion.



The drama starts from the very first episode, as the triplets start fighting over her while Wataru gives her a present ticket for “100 smooches” and promises to try his hardest to grow into man worthy of her. Not all of her brothers fight for her; some are only watching from the sidelines like Hikaru (26), a cross-dressing novelist, who watches his brothers fight and keeps a table showing the odds of each brother and their chances of winning the heart of their step-sister. However, not long before the end, he burns the odds chart to join the fray himself. Luckily, the show ends on an anticlimactic note when Ema rejects all her brothers, showing them only sisterly love. Despite the rejection, nobody wants to give in and they continue to fight for her. We’re lucky there wasn’t a second season of this show, because given its origins, it would most likely become an H-anime.


Dishonorable Mentions:


Hentai Prince - Oh boy, here’s the other 50% of why he’s in romantic purgatory with all of the female cast. So we have the sisters Tsukiko and Tsukushi, who are both in love with Yuto. The problem is that Tsukushi is not just in love with Yuto’s perverted “younger brother” (he doesn’t have a brother, she just bought a cover story hook, line, and sinker), but she’s also in love with her own little sister - so much so that she genuinely wants to move to a country where gay marriage is legalised so that they can get hitched. She’s even taken incest laws into account: by treating her sister like a piece of shit for the first half of the story, she is hoping to get estranged so they’re no longer considered family. By the end of the series, Tsukushi wants to marry both Yuto’s alter-ego and her sister, while Tsukiko and Yuto want nothing to do with her crazy bullshit.



Vividred Operation - Not only are those girls in middle school, one of them is your granddaughter, you creepy-ass gerbil. Get your skin-tight costumes, deliberately-revealing mahou shoujo transformations, and in-universe creepshot cinematography the fuck outta here. If not for this airing 13 years after the Richard Gere scandal, we’d have thought it was a direct inspiration, thus making the grandpa a ‘creepy ass-gerbil’ instead. As it stands, he’s got multiple arrest warrants out for him for various forms of mad science, even if they haven’t quite figured out how far up the sex offender registry he should be yet.




Neptunia - Let’s set aside the pedophile clown robot for a moment. Did you think that was all the squick Neptunia had to offer? Haha, nooooope. Despite being a crazy BL fangirl, Vert is a rampaging, consent-ignoring lesbian, going after girls of all ages. She one-sidedly adopts her friends’ little sisters as her own, has no problem molesting girls of all ages, and then has the gall to try and act as some sort of righteous protector of children despite being a clear and present danger to them herself.



PhotoKano - While low on the list compared to some of these, “Everything is eventually consensual!” and “Nothing really dirty actually happens, he only takes photos of them in various states of undress and/or restraint!” are still pretty bad.




Arpeggio of Blue Steel / Unbreakable Machine-Doll - We know we’ve used this before, but it’s no less relevant here than any other year:





Loser: Attack on Titan - The Scout Regiment is a largely dysfunctional and self-cannibalizing group of incompetent teenagers in way over their heads. Now, focusing a post-apocalyptic disaster-focused story around this kind of group could be interesting. Attack on Titan, however, fails to capitalize on this premise by instead making Eren, Armin, Mikasa, and the rest of the group so fundamentally unable to work with each other that it leaves the show’s various conflicts feeling unearned and unsatisfying.



Take episode 5, for example: As Armin and Eren struggle to survive the invading Titans, not only do they simply watch as many members of the Scout Regiment get eaten (despite their months of training), but Eren himself gets eaten. Because Armin’s cowardice outweighs his ability to actually function in a human-vs-Titan conflict, Eren (who’d already lost a leg at this point) is forced to rescue Armin, getting eaten in the process. If not for Eren’s Titan shifting powers, this essentially means that five episodes in, AoT kills off its main character because of the incompetence of its cast.




Then there’s the constant tension between Jean and literally every other Scout or Mikasa’s inability to see beyond her blind love for Eren, which make an already dysfunctional cast even more so. If this show treated its cast more believably, none of them would still be alive, save for maybe Mikasa. Attack on Sanity is a vicious cycle of incompetent people engaged in unhealthy relationships that further exascerbate their incompetence, leading to unearned and frustrating outcomes for those same incompetent people.



Dishonorable Mentions:



Flowers of Evil - The cast of this show really boils down to three people with incredibly unhealthy relationships. Kasuga is being blackmailed and abused by Nakamura, and even after he manages to get in a relationship with the girl he loves, Saeki, Nakamura is constantly trying to ruin his life and causes them to break up. But because Nakamura isn’t just happy with ruining Kasuga’s half of the relationship, she ends up breaking Saeki in the process. By the end, having broken up with Saeki and making her go full Yandere, Kasuga decides to pledge his love and life to his abuser. Just to drive this point home, the final episode is a clip show of all the horrible things that the two girls do to Kasuga throughout the show including when Saeki rapes him - which wasn’t included in the anime in the first place.


Date A Live - Where most harem shows that aren’t trying to be psychological horror feature, at worst, the girls begrudgingly tolerating each other’s company, this one has them all actively trying to kill each other. While this is bad enough on its own, there’s an even bigger problem: it’s utterly impossible to create any sort of chemistry, romantic or otherwise, between a boy and a bunch of girls when he’s working under his dominatrix loli little sister’s orders to pretend to date them, to prevent global extinction. We want to re-emphasize that: Cockblocking him will be the death of humanity and/or the physical destruction of the planet, and they’re all still trying to fuck each other over.



Samurai Flamenco - So we mentioned the main character who is a wannabe superhero, his best friend who is a mentally unstable cop, and a female idol group that get themselves into more trouble than they’re worth. But we haven’t mentioned that that we get a full fucking super sentai team!


And oh boy do they play to the character traits of sentai. And lest you assume their teamwork and friendship will last the series, they throw Masayoshi under a bus 5 episodes after they’re introduced, leaving him on the run from the government.


Dog & Scissors - While Kirihime is the absolute bottom of the barrel, there’s plenty of other awful female characters in this show. Here’s a quick breakdown of some other offenders:




After his death, Kazuhito’s sister Madoka completely falls off the deep end, and decides to blame his favorite author’s books for his demise. She also turns into a yandere, and even though she can’t hear his every thought like Kirihime can, she is convinced that the dog she found is her brother for no fucking reason.




Also, she wields a talking chainsaw/cannon and frequently busts it out to battle people that she sees as a threat (read: EVERYONE) to her beloved brother.




Suzuna Hiiragi is Kirihime’s editor, and the most insane character in the show that doesn’t want to fuck a dog. She frequently taunts Kirihime and insults her flat chest, primarily because she’s a huge masochist that wants Kirihime to torture her as much as she tortures Kazuhito. But of course, this isn’t enough, so whenever Kirihime gets writers block, she goes out of her way to “help” her get over it - including murdering a serial killer and stealing his identity just so that she could get punished harder when she got caught.




Both of these characters could have made it as worst female, as well, but since this entire show exists because of Kirihime, she gets top billing as the poster child for its shittiness.



Galilei Donna - Galilei Donna follows the Ferrari family, descendants of Galileo Galilei. The mother and father get kidnapped by air pirates in the first episode, and their three daughters fly off after them in a goldfish aircraft. At that point, the middle daughter Hazuki locks herself in her room and screams for her sisters to just solve all of her problems. Apart from the youngest daughter Hozuki (who is, of course, a tech genius) the others hardly contribute. They somehow manage to solve all their problems with 3/5ths of the family being gone and/or deadweight. Oh, and they also travel back in time to meet Galileo himself, and Hozuki has better chemistry with someone from the 17th century than anyone else in this damn cast.





Loser: Symphogear G - If you thought the first season was full of nonsense, technobabble, and plotholes, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. For starters, Dr. Ver’s plans were horseshit from the very beginning; he jumped so far off the deep end he cracked his skull on the opposite edge of the pool. He never intended to actually fix anything, despite the public version of his plans actually working in the end. When this was pointed out to him, he basically went “Yeah, I know. But that doesn’t make me a cool enough hero, so fuck it, I’m destroying the world even faster.”




They also heavily invoked the total bullshit Sailor Moon Statute, wherein nobody recognizes a magical girl in their fighting outfit, even with their face revealed and unaltered. Somehow, even after season 1, nobody knows that Tsubasa is one of the Symphogear squad members. The only person that actually gets exposed is Maria, and that’s because not only did she out herself as a terrorist-cum-Symphogear at the very start, but near the end she literally exposed herself on a global pirate broadcast, having hacked into every public big-screen TV across the planet before going through the entire thinly-veiled-nudity magical girl transformation on screen.




The worldbuilding also dropped the ball really hard. The image above comes up during a bunch of technobabble about Phonic Gain, Swan Songs, Sync Rates, and drugs to boost all of these. What the fuck studies are you talking about?! There are no other actual Symphogear users. If there were, they would have been at several places in this very season, such as when a terrorist group declared world domination on live global TV, or during the “negotiations” between the terrorists and the Amercian government, or, you know, STOPPING THE MOON FROM CRASHING INTO THE EARTH. Where the hell are any of the people that would be capable of conducting these studies?!




Then there’s the cockamamie trash heap of Fine, her reincarnations, and the Deus Ex Igalima. Multiple heel-heel turns were made based on false premises and even falser promises. Then they bullshitted their way out of one plothole and into another, via Igalima being a “soul-slayer” - which Kirika somehow forgot while fighting Shirabe with it in a twisted mockery of Romeo and Juliet, and which never comes up again. Worse, the plothole they were trying to fix had already made itself moot anyway.




And as one final bit of outrage, it turned out NASTASSJA’S WHEELCHAIR WAS A FUCKING POWERED SUIT THE ENTIRE TIME. Why the fuck did she ever need anyone to push her goddamned chair around?!

Dishonorable Mentions:

Valvrave - This show is stupid at the best of times, if sometimes enjoyably so, but it revels in its own silliness and can hardly keep itself together at times. Episode 10, wherein the protagonist Haruto is shown raping his fellow pilot Saki intercut with scenes of Shouko (who he is in love with) rallying at a school meeting, is not one of those times. The reason they give for this act is that he needs to steal “Rune energy” from another living being, and though he doesn’t know this yet, his refusal to do so leads to his death later (even though Saki says she wouldn’t mind helping him not go berserk again on anyone else).




The worst thing about this rape scene is not the fact it comes out of fucking nowhere; it’s that it happens towards the end of the shows first cour and they sweep it under the fucking rug by the start of the next season like it never happened. He only finds out that his refusal would kill him after they’ve already moved on and ignored the rape anyway.




Fairy Tail - Fairy Tail shares the same problem as many other big shounen anime: it’s length leaves it full of plot holes. It contains all the clichés any similar anime has with new members being found, the first mission, disposing of several dark guilds, and building the power of love and friendship. But the show starts to completely derail around the 11th episode, when most of the Fairy Tail members are sucked into an alternative dimension called Edolas, which steals magic from Earth. Seeing two of each character behaving in a totally different way throws you off and you start to question what you’ve been watching up to that point. Oh, except for the fact that a character that is dead in their world and had been used for several of the cast’s character developments turns out to have fallen into Edolas from their original world, so she never even died in the first place! Way to undo your own emotional moments and make the whole show worse in retrospect. That’s really only the beginning of where it get’s stupid, but sadly(?) most of the dumbest twists happened in later seasons.



Date A Live - There are two possible options if an impending spacequake is announced. You either run for the shelter and pray for survival, or you die. There is no other option... unless you’re Itsuka Shidou. Rushing to save his little sister, he finds himself in the epicenter of the next spacequake with a mysterious girl who caused it. Before fainting while protecting the girl, he discovers that the spirits causing these spacequakes are girls, and his classmate Origami is in the Anti-Spirits Team trying to kill them all. While killing them is the safe option, the other method is to seal their power with kiss after a successful date, and that is exactly what Itsuka will be doing for the rest of his life, commanded by his little sister and everybody on the floating ship Fraxinus.




Dog & Scissors - This is here on more of a meta level. You’d think that if one of your main protagonists is a professional writer, your plot would be coherent rather than fucking terrible. But much like a fanfic writer trying to write intelligent characters, they completely missed it on all levels, resulting in an insufferable mess.




Red Data Girl / Wanna Be The Strongest! - Funimation needs to market these as some sort of ASMR program, because they literally put us to sleep while watching them. This is doubly impressive for Wanna Be The Strongest, a show about idols wrestling in skimpy outfits.




Yes, this shit was already going strong in 2013.




Balala Xiaomoxian: Qiji Wubu



It’s basically Chinese Precure. It’s also season 2 of its franchise.


Zhandou Wang Zhi Jufeng Zhan Hun



It’s basically Chinese Beyblade.


5) Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - Wasting sky-high production values is nothing new, but Gargantia broke new ground by being the very first show to earn itself a cancellation of its next season after it had been announced, solely on the “merits” of its content rather than any sort of labor or financial issue. This probably isn’t the very worst show, but considering the show The Urobutcher created after what we assume was depression caused by this was Aldnoah.Zero, we’re putting this here because that show can never be Slained hard enough.




4) Red Data Girl - It doesn’t do any one thing particularly egregiously, but it does everything poorly. If we had a Most Boring category, Red Data Girl would win hands-down. The characters are flat, the story is pointless, it goes absolutely nowhere. It sent several of us to sleep while trying to watch it - multiple times, even.




3) Dog & Scissors - As with Hand Shakers in our 2017 awards, Dog & Scissors was nominated for an excessive amount of categories. We just thought other shows deserved to be roasted harder in most of them. But now that we’re down here, did we mention this show is meant to be a goddamned mystery series?! The death and reincarnation of Kazuhito is solved in literally 1 episode and every other mystery in the show is solved in equally shitty and bullshit manners. This was easily the worst show of the year… that wasn’t a sequel.




2) Infinite Stratos 2 - This entire season should never have been greenlit. It took everything people could even consider liking about the first season and threw it all out. It was a total shitshow with incomprehensible bullshit masquerading as a plot and the entire latter half of the season being abysmal filler.




And even with as much of an insult as this season was, the OVAs released once the next LN volume arrived were somehow even more insulting! How do you make the densest harem protagonist in all of anime even denser? Simple: you have him jump into the harem members’ dreams and watch him COCKBLOCK HIMSELF. No, seriously, he stops everyone’s idealized versions of himself from invading their beds because it would be impolite. At least let them have their (wet) dreams, you moron!




1) OreImo 2 - Not only was this a rotten turd of a show, but it set the stage for all manner of incestuous shitheaps throughout the rest of the decade. Incest had been mostly a minor subplot in harem shows before, but this set a precedent for the little sister winning the race (to the bottom).




While the Throwbacks get more difficult as we go further and further back, due to pathetic human memory and our complete lack of isekai-protagonist-level complete recall of previous events, we’re still trucking along in an effort to reach 2010 at some point. That’s the goal here, and if you think you can stomach it, you’re welcome to join us on the road. Hopefully we’ll see you sooner for next year’s Throwback, but you probably shouldn’t hold your breath, or you won’t last till next Halloween.




BUT FEAR NOT,



For like the Disney Vault’s endlessly swallowed and regurgitated content,

Like the reruns of that show your siblings forced you to watch that you absolutely despised,


Like a massive phoenix made of the stagnant, leftover popcorn butter at the movie theatre after a matinee weekend,

The Throwback Slaines will rise again next year!

—Love, The Animasochists

