Manga Adaptation by Tezuka Productions
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

Salaryman Tetsuo Tosu fears for his daughter Reika’s life after finding out that she is being beaten up by her boyfriend – a gangster named Matori Nobuto who extorts money from young women and their families. After being beaten up himself by Nobuto and his gang, Tetsuo kills him in a fit of rage and is now faced with the consequences, including disposing of the body and working with his wife to protect both themselves and their daughter from further harm when people start questioning Nobuto’s sudden disappearance.

Artemis’ verdict: Offensively Bad

Let’s go beyond the fact that this anime both looks and sounds pretty cheap and skip straight to the point: this is a male revenge fantasy about a middle-aged dude murdering a wannabe yakuza guy with a rice cooker for beating up his daughter, who said yakuza guy was dating. Presumably, the dad now has to take on members of the dead guy’s gang, who obviously notice their leader’s sudden disappearance and start putting two and two together, so viewers can probably expect a reasonably high body count with this one.

That’s all well and good on paper I guess, but in practice, I haven’t seen such botched execution in a long time. The writing isn’t just uninspired or cliché – it’s outright cringe-inducing for all the wrong reasons. I was already a bit wary of My Home Hero going in, because female family members of male-targeted action/thiller pieces generally don’t tend to have a great time of it, but this show is just so on-the-nose that it sails right beyond unsubtle or even distasteful and straight into offensive territory. We literally have flashily-dressed gangsters with animal-print shirts and gold chains, the whole nine yards, beating up random dudes on the street in broad daylight as bystanders watch on, awkwardly pretending not to notice. We have guys loudly talking to each other about beating up their women, gloatingly comparing various scenarios, from fracturing skulls to rupturing organs.

I’m not saying that anime shouldn’t be portraying domestic violence and physical/sexual assault, but being this crudely overstated and blundering about it does those themes absolutely no favors, and that’s putting it mildly. Do yourself a solid and skip this one.

Jel’s verdict: Why Does This Exist?

In the first few minutes of this episode, I was initially thinking “why is this an anime?” The premise seems better suited for a live action drama. Even if the animation was good (it’s bad), it’s not being used to add anything to the presentation. Then as the episode went on, I started to ask “why does this even exist at all?” The writing is a total hack job. It’s like someone made an outline of the story and the characters are just reading it word for word. There is no nuance or subtlety, despite some unintentionally hilarious attempts at moral ambiguity toward the end. I could probably write several more paragraphs about the implications of this particular type of male revenge fantasy, but that’s more than this show deserves. This is a safe one to skip.