Mahoraba ~Heartful Days~ - 01

(images added once I got capture working)

So it turns out that Mahoraba ~Heartful days~ is based on a manga, not a hentai game. I was surprised at first - after all, the female lead has a split personality, which is just the sort of inspired perversion I've come to expect from those things. Two sexual partners, but they only have to come up with one character design!

And then there's Megumi. Megumi has big breasts, glasses, antenna-hair, and little fangs. It's as if creator Akira Kojima was trying to get all the fetishes out of the way right at the start - until a little further in, when it turns out that Meg is actually the scary older woman who never, ever gets into the doujinshi because all the male fans are every bit as terrified of aggressive women as the main character they're supposed to identify with. (No, Virginia, Tenchi wasn't gay, he was just scared to death of sexuality.)

So I'm starting to suspect that Kojima is playing a little game here, and I'm certainly not averse to having games played in this sort of show. In fact, Rozen Maiden last season convinced me that there's going to be a harem-show backlash, it's going to be soon, and it's going to be great, even if that show took its inspired premise (it's just like a harem show, except the girls are all dolls! Hee!) and wasn't interested in doing much with it besides building an internal mythology.

I have a little better idea of what Mahoroba is up to, though, and I think it has to do with the setting: not just a lovely old Japanese boarding house, complete with garden and koi pond, but a lovely old boarding house surrounded by ultramodern skyscrapers.

This show thinks of itself as traditional.

In other words, it's a Maison Ikkoku wannabe, not an Ai Yori Aoshi wannabe. Kojima has the same feeling as the Ah My Goddess crew; somewhere around the beginning of the 90s, this genre went off the rails, and so let's wind the clock back and see if we do better. If I'm lucky, it'll hearken back to the classic Takahashi format of "one girl for every character flaw the author can think of" instead of the modern "one girl for every sexual fetish." If I'm really lucky, the jokes'll actually be funny.

Or it might have that same awkward uncomfortable feeling as those Ah My Goddess OAVs. Kozue, that female lead, has a split personality that works as follows: she's sweet and compliant, unless you startle her or get her riled up, in which case she becomes rude and unfeminine. (Yes, I'm pretty sure that's the adjective her rough speech is meant to bring to mind.) There's an attempt here, perhaps, to comment on the ridiculous overfeminization of ren'ai heroines, but I'm not sure I like the symbolism of the counterexample.

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