De:vadasy

http://www.otakunovideo.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/devadasy-210x300.jpg

Year: 2000

Episodes: 3

Director: Nobuhiro Kondo

Writer: Sho Tokimura

Anime Review
de:vadasy is a very weird show. On the one hand, it's a slow Evangelion clone with the harem bits somewhat more emphasized. Aliens have attacked, humanity's uncovered a biomechanical giant robot and an emotionless girl. But! We'll cross that with a harem anime: to choose the pilot, humanity's greatest (surviving) minds decide to create an exclusive academy, where a bunch of kids all come to train. So you've got a horny boy, his Cute Childhood Friend, and the rest of the girls in the class. Oh, and all the kids in this class look to be in early Junior High. And I mean early Junior High.

I'm pretty sure de:vadasy was originally a loli hentai dating sim. (There's very little information about it online.) You can see the bones: the horndog male protagonist surrounded by a class of cute girls. Then they threw in the Evangelion plotline to spice things up. You can even see it in the animation; the other girls in the class have suspiciously detailed character designs and stock poses. But they don't even have voices in the series, and that's ultimately the problem.

(When I say it's an Evangelion clone, I mean it: in the first episode, the main mecha's arm is broken by an alien, and the mecha later goes berserker and breaks the alien's arm. There's even a shot in episode three that precisely replicates frame-for-frame the shot in Eva's first episode of the army brass around a table, one of them banging his fist in frustration.)

This OVA runs for about 80 minutes, and it basically has three characters: the main boy, the Childhood Friend, and the Rei Ayanami clone. I know there are others, but they exist almost exclusively to provide infodumps about the aliens and the technology. The only character development surrounds the pilots.

And it's about rape.

Really. Just to make this even more like hentai, the giant robot is powered by sexual energy. So, the greater the sexual desire between the two kids inside, the better it will function. Oh, and that's not all! The boy is the pilot; the girl is the battery. She's just there to lay stretched out and naked, and blush and grunt occasionally. I'm not kidding. Even Gainax never went this far.

But just to make it weirder, this is totally softcore stuff. There's barely a single naked rear end in this show, and only a few exposed breasts. The sex scenes all occur completely off-screen. Not that I wanted it, but in a mecha show where the mecha is powered by sexual desire, I expected the show to deal with sex.

Instead, it deals with attempted rape. Getting back to that: rape turns out to be the core theme of the show. The protagonist (and that's how memorable this show was; I can't remember anybody's names) gets sexually frustrated in the middle of the show while he's with the Cute Childhood Friend. He's so frustrated that he pushes her onto his bed, and clearly tries to rape her. She slaps him and runs off with mildly dislodged clothing; that's as far as he gets. The next day, he apologizes awkwardly with a lame "I don't know what got into me" line, which she shrugs off. Without spoiling it, I'll say that the ending hinges on the protagonist realizing that he went too far, deeply offended her, and never properly addressed it with her.

This was about the only part of the show that I appreciated. As opposed to so many other anime series, where casual indifference to a woman's feelings is de rigueur, de:vadasy approaches it as not just wrong, but a serious grievance that has to be put right for a relationship to move forward.

But pretty much everything else about this show is mediocre, and I mean that in the dictionary sense: the middle of the pack, unexceptional, or of moderate quality. This is a late-90's AIC show, so the animation is okay, the character designs are easy on the eyes and look good from many angles, the direction communicates what it needs to. But the show is incredibly slow and drawn out. Here's the plot:

Episode 1: Kids pilot giant robot, and flash back to entering the academy.

Episode 2: The attempted rape.

Episode 3: Fighting the final evil alien robot.

There are no memorable shots; no cool action sequences. The music is serviceable--soaring when it needs to be and sad when it needs to be--but offers no consistent themes or memorable melodies. The voice actors speak their lines with proper emotion; no complaints, but nothing remarkable.

Worse, especially for an AIC show, the characters are completely forgettable. The protagonist shows no initiative, the Cute Childhood Friend exists to be a cute tsundere character, and the Rei clone is...a Rei clone, totally pliant.

What does it say when the rape plotline is the only element of your show that rises above mediocrity?