Sometimes a show comes along that just deserves to be eviscerated. Perhaps it showcases the worst of anime’s stereotypes. Perhaps it takes an interesting premise and ruins it with befuddling plots or infuriating character arcs. Perhaps you think a show should literally be labelled a war crime by the Geneva Convention. That’s where the HATEWATCH comes in. When the show does it to such a degree, sometimes you need to watch it just for the cathartic value of demolishing whatever dreg of culture or bad taste it represents. This is #HATEWATCH 2017. The show: A Sister Is All You Need. Its sins: ANIME IS STILL GETTING AWAY WITH THIS LITTLE SISTER BS

Ah the famous tell, don’t show. Nayu is totally a good writer because everyone tells us so and her vast character flaws can’t possible undermine that.

Marlin’s Thoughts

They’re really struggling to put episodes together at this point. Not only do we have a pretty lazy attempt at characterization by proxy for Nayu (immediately destroyed by how self-evident her vicious nature is), but we also have another lame card game that just wastes time in the feeblest most half-assed attempt at comedy this show can muster. First off, we get this bland plot thread of Miyako getting interested in the Light Novel business… for some reason. Despite the fact that they show the whole process to be a thankless task of herding cats, they seem to be positioning Miyako to remove her outsider status by actually getting her involved in the industry. It’s so frustrating to see how they keep using Nayu again and again because it’s so obvious that she’s the real self insert mary sue, not Itsuki. She’s always the best, she always gets what she wants, she inexplicably has the power and initiative to do things others can’t. It’s like a dark dream of what a sad otaku thinks being a woman is really like. It fails on every level.

Once again, this show tries to eat its cake and have it too in the second half. We’re seriously meant to both take that farce, and to be honest farce is too kind of a word for it, and then pivot into Haruto talking about relationships like the previous scene didn’t completely invalidate any position this show could take as a credible romantic comedy. It’s like this show is actually written by two or three different writers who were told vastly different things about what happened before they start making the next section. Now with all the cards on the table, are they really going to try and engineer a love triangle? What would that even look like? This story is incapable of narrative cohesion for one minute let alone several episodes, and now they think they can claim to tie things together? Just the very thought is insulting. Never did I realize how many different kinds of hate this show would elicit from me; disgust, incredulity, outrage, and yet out of all of them the one I come back to most is simple contempt for what it pretends to be in stark contrast to what it clearly is.

Putting a marble filter on everything does not good art make.

Marlin’s Ethics Lesson of the Week

St. Thomas Aquinas states that the greatest friendship should lie between that of a man and his wife. Using Aristotle as his guide, the greatest friendship is one of complete equity between the two persons. That might make Itsuki’s ideal to match Nayu make sense, but really it’s absolutely selfish. This is because true friendship lies in desiring the good of the other, and thus to not be thinking of Nayu and only himself when wanting to be in equity with her is not treating her as a true friend.

Yes, let’s talk openly about your relationship with the girl we know is incredibly sneaky and conniving, she isn’t totally faking sleep over there.

Random observations

• Nothing really to note this week.  Sun shines, grass grows, birds fly, and brothers keep wanting to fuck their sisters.

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