Is there some unwritten rule stating that at least one of the far too many horrible anime shorts released every season has to please at least one of us? Last season, I only wanted to do this post because it meant I could make other people watch Pupa, yet this season I got the — rimshot — short end of the stick once again. Anyways, let’s take a look at The Comic Artist and His Assistants, Keroro, Inugami and Nekoyama and Magica Wars, and see if any of them are worth your ti– Okay, yeah, sorry, I can’t finish that sentence this season either. Here we go again.

The Comic Artist and His Assistants

Alternate Titles: Mangaka-san to Assistant-san, Sexual Harassment At Work
Manga Adaptation by Zexcs
Simulcast on Crunchyroll

Premise

Yuki Aito is a third-rate perverted manga artist who needs help ‘understanding the feelings’ of the female characters in his manga, often at the expense of his young assistant and editor. Alternatively, this is a show about workplace sexual harassment. Hilarious!

Aqua’s Verdict: Canceled by Popular Demand

You could say The Comic Artist and His Assistants makes fun of ecchi manga clichés and whatever goes on in the heads of the pathetic weirdos that write them, but it quickly turns out Aito is the one you’re supposed to relate to here. What follows are twelve agonizing minutes that bring you closer to crying than laughing, rife with drawn-out jokes about how hilariously perverted that Aito is and how his level-headed female associates end up (of course, more often than not willing) victims of his antics. The Comic Artist and His Assistants is a pitiably hare-brained pandaemonium so blissfully unaware of how utterly idiotic is it offends its viewers on top of women, comic artists and people with brains, and by far the best thing that can be said about it is that at least it’s not a full series. Also, minus a billion points for using the word ‘lewd’.

Keroro!

Alternate Titles: Sgt. Frog: The Next Generation
Manga adaptation by Sunrise
Simulcast pending

Premise

Keroro, the beloved frog-like alien returns to Earth to wreak havoc and make little children buy toys.

Aqua’s Verdict:

Keroro is over before anyone not called Usain Bolt can voice some sort of opinion on it, but as far as the actual target audience is concerned, I could actually see this working for short jokes during commercial breaks or something like that. The flash animation is not completely terrible, and the one joke it had, if not a bit simplistic, actually made me smile for once. Now we just wait for the English gag dub.

Inugami and Nekoyama

Alternate Titles: Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san, Token Lesbians
Manga adaptation by Seven
Simulcast on Crunchyroll

Premise

Inugami acts like a dog, but likes cats. Nekoyama acts like a cat, but likes dogs. For this bizarrely zoophilic reason, they fall in love with each other. At least that’s what the summary says. In reality, this is Benio from Engaged to the Unidentified getting her own show. Hilarious!

Aqua’s Verdict:

Yuri fans will probably gobble this up like barbecued marshmallows, because it certainly has everything they usually go head over heels for: no characters, no plot, no jokes and no romance. Unless you define ‘romance’ as pervertedly gushing over the object of your affection and interpreting everything they say as something ‘lewd’, because that’s exactly what Inugami and Nekoyama is. Oh well, at least it attempted to have more than one semblance of a joke in a single four-minute episode, I’ll give it that. Congratulations?

Magica Wars

Alternate Titles: Mahou Shoujo Taisen, Japanese Angry Birds
Anime original by Gainax
Simulcast on Crunchyroll

Premise

Each Japanese prefecture has its own magical girl mascot. They fight monsters and occasionally each other. That’s the plot.

Aqua’s Verdict: Everything but Magical

I could insert some huge rant about the humiliating downfall of Gainax, but everyone and their mums know that at this point, no one from the Gainax we know and love is left at Gainax proper. What remains is one of the absolute most low-tier of anime studios, which can’t even finish a show it announced would air this season and as such, has to rely on animating a show about a character from a mobile phone game getting yelled at by an Angry Bird for three minutes. That’s the show. Literally. Don’t watch it. Don’t watch any of these.