Yeah, I get the joke.
Just for the record, that other shounen thing about oni with magic demon blood or whatever began with a 5 minute info dump with a literal whiteboard to help the exposition along. When it seemed like a fight was about to break out, it smash cut past it so it could continue the exposition. Then he was recruited into their teenager club and sent to their special high school to meet the rest of his radical teenage friends. So… no. God no.
Impressions:
I’ve long held that actual humor around sex and relationships is largely unexplored in anime. There are the occasional dabblings, like Yamada’s quest to get laid, but for the most part, it never gets past a panty shot and then someone yelling “pervert!” It’s one of the things that I really liked about Softhouse Chara games, if I can wax nostalgic for a moment. Sex was just a part of characters’ interactions, and there was a lot of teasing, quips, back and forth (heh), etc above and beyond just the physicality. All this is to say that I don’t think this was very good or engaged with sex on anything but a very puerile and superficial level. It’s hardly any different from any of these club or traveling shows where it doesn’t actually engage with the subject and have fun with it, it just points at it and goes “WHOOOOOAAAA” either with sparklies if dramatic, or laugh track if comedic. Made even more boring because the protagonist spends the entire episode morosely shuffling through it, not interacting with anybody or anything.
So it’s very much like Panty and Stocking in that it’s just pointing at sexual acts and yelling “YO! CHECK THIS OUT! WE’RE SHOWING CLOTHED HUMPING! HOW SUBVERSIVE AND REBELLIOUS IS THAT!?” Except that it’s 2025. There’s stuff nearly as racy on the depressing weekly news talk shows where the main subject is how a lack of health spa regulation is responsible for thousands of deaths a year. There’s a whole cottage industry of barely contained British ‘romance’ shows that are mainly that. HBO exists and Game of Thrones started fourteen years ago. School Days is old enough to vote. You are so far behind the times. Contains somewhat more explicit sexual acts is nothing. This is a sex comedy in that it contains people in the background having sex. Better than all the comedies that have people in the foreground yelling overreactions, and I applaud their restraint for not having the main character loudly announce the joke that people are having sex every 20 seconds, but there’s no jokes except “public sex is mandatory.” He throws some lube at some point? Because lube is a sex thing. That’s as clever as this episode got.
