The Great Anime Marathon of 2020! #16 – #20: Join the Club!

One of the most Japanese things you can get are the school clubs represented in countless anime and manga. Sure, school clubs do exist elsewhere, however, Japan has their own special way of doing things that makes them feel unique.

While there’s a lot more “club” themed anime on my marathon list, let’s start with these five picks, some of which are great, while others… well, let’s just have a look.

The following is a spoiler-free list of anime I’ve seen this year in no particular order:

#16: Asobi Asobase: Workshop of Fun

• Season 1, including OVAs: Complete series to date (sub)

Join the Pastimers Club! It’s nice and peaceful and nothing strange ever happens… ever. No, that’s a lie, a horrible, wonderful lie. Asobi Asobase got me 100% with its humour and I laughed my ass off at all of the crazy antics in that show.

I especially love how the opening theme lulls you into a trap, making you think this anime is about cute little girls doing cute little girl things… whatever the hell that is.

Instead, what you’re treated to from the very first scene is a downward spiral of stupid shit perpetrated by our three main characters, Hanako, Olivia and Kasumi. These three decide to start a club where all they do is waste time screwing around with each other to pass the time.

That’s it, that’s the club… but considering how neurotic the three girls are, their antics end up causing everyone around them (and each other) a lot of grief.

Then, when you get to the end credits, the mask is fully lifted and you’re treated to the real heart of the show. I love this anime, it’s so much fun and so stupid, it’s great!

#17: Hyouka

• Season 1, including OVA: Complete series to date (dub)

Join the Classic Literature Club! Why you ask? Ironically, not for the reason you would think, rather, you join this club to solve a series of minor mysteries, most of which have no real relevance to anything other than satiating a certain character’s curiosity.

This is an interesting series in that it makes each of those minor mysteries seem more grand and more important than they actually are and gets you sucked into solving it along with the characters.

It’s an odd show, but I liked it. Definitely up there as one of the more unique anime I’ve watched in the way that it draws you in, despite it having the usual club setting with the usual mix of quirky teenagers.

#18: Gamers!

• Season 1: Complete series to date (dub)

Join the Gamers Club! Why? So you can play video games, that’s why! Sounds good? Well, unfortunately, this anime didn’t really have that much of an impact with me.

To be blunt, it fell totally flat and never really captured my attention for too long. It’s set around the whole romantic comedy element but this one didn’t really do it for me. I can barely remember this anime because it was that unmemorable, that’s how much it fell flat.

All I can really remember is that I didn’t really connect at all with any of the characters and their antics. It’s basically a comedy based on a series of misunderstandings one after the other, but nothing all that interesting happens aside from a pretty standard teenage romance blooming plotline.

#19: K-On!

• Season 1 – 2, including OVAs: Complete series to date (dub)
• K-On! the Movie (dub)

Join the Light Music Club! I’m sure everyone would join if we dressed up as creepy looking animals and hand out flyers.

Yeah, it’s no surprise that K-On got 5 out of 5 stars, you can’t deny that it’s a good, fun show. The characters are great, the relationship between every character is great, the premise is great… everything is great.

It’s simply a show you watch because it’s fun and you can have a laugh at the Light Music Club’s silly antics and personalities. The moe is strong with this one and while I don’t really care one way or another about “moe culture” or whatever, I still enjoyed K-On quite a lot.

#20: Haganai

• Season 1 – 2, including OVAs: Complete series to date (dub)

Join the Neighbours Club! What? No, fuck off! I’d rather have no friends than be in that club!

Oh, boy… here we go. I’ve purposefully put this series last on the list because it’s going to be a looong rant. I know I said these mini-reviews would be spoiler-free (and be mini), but…

Warning: From here on out, this entry contains spoilers for Haganai.

From the author of “A Sister’s All You Need” comes a club anime where the exact same kinds of brother/sister complex and fetish shenanigans are just slathered all over, like sunscreen being rubbed/mashed on your back by a bitchy girl’s bitch foot.

However, this is, funnily enough, not the problem with Haganai. I have to accept that the author of these two series has certain strange tastes. It’s not my thing and became pretty tiring, but let’s table that bullshit as it has already been discussed previously with the other series.

What we’re here to talk about with Haganai is that, while it strives to be a comedy, it ended up, for me at least, veering into a place it didn’t intend for me to go.

I’ve given this a lot of thought and the problem seems to stem from the difference in tone that the first season has with the second season, titled, “Haganai NEXT” because why not. The first season does its very best to try and tow that “anime comedy with weird fetishes” line and does it well enough to keep you watching, so let’s start there.

The basic premise is that a boy named Kodaka Hasegawa has no friends because everyone in school thinks he’s a delinquent due to his dirty blonde hair, though, he’s really just a housewife at heart… jeez, where have I seen this before? Stay tuned for a later anime marathon entry where I give pretty much the exact same description again for a different character, one from a better story written before Haganai ever came out.

Anyway, this guy, who we will refer to as “Coward” from now on, meets a strange girl named Yozora who we shall refer to as “Bitch Face” from now on. Yada, yada, they realise they’re both socially inept and Bitch Face gets the bright idea to start the Neighbours Club together with Coward so that they can both attempt to make friends. Though, Bitch Face has ulterior motives that come to light as you progress through season 1.

Of course, when the first person who comes to join their club ends up being a hottie-blonde girl named Sena, Bitch Face tries to put the kibosh on that, fearing that Sena will attract Coward’s attention.

With Sena in the club, the Bitch Face goes into overdrive… and this is where the crux of the comedic aspect of the show is meant to come from. The majority of the antics revolves around the rivalry between Bitch Face and Sena with Coward being stuck in the middle having to deal with both of them.

Sena, who is brilliant both academically and athletically, is a social outcast in her own right due to her own flavour of social ineptitude. However, as the series progresses, you start to notice that she is emotionally immature and has a harder time dealing with Bitch Face’s constant, unwavering abuse than the rest of the members who end up joining the club.

It’s easy to see why Bitch Face would feel threatened by Sena. She’s extremely attractive, is smart, great at everything she puts her mind to and has almost everything going for her. Essentially, Sena’s positive qualities is the excuse we’re given for why it’s okay for Bitch Face to be such an abusive bitch toward her.

Early on, it seemed fine, I laughed at the two girls being overly competitive with each other somewhat during the first season when the jokes managed to land, but that didn’t last. Especially when you begin to realise that Sena isn’t capable of standing up to Bitch Face and she is completely incapable of giving as good as she gets. In fact, it’s pretty much just Bitch Face clubbing the baby seal that is Sena for 99% of the series while Coward watches like the limp-wrist coward he is, thus enabling Bitch Face’s abuse.

On top of that, it gets worse once the tone of the series changes in season 2 due to a pivotal moment at the end of season 1. During the final episode of season 1, Coward realises that Bitch Face is actually his long-lost childhood friend having now seen her with short hair.

Going into season 2, we find out that Coward and Sena played with each other as small children because their father’s were best friends, but neither of them remember because they were too young, thus forming a link between them as well. While the romance elements in season 1 were very subtle, we start to get a full love triangle forming in season 2, but with harem qualities attached.

Basically, it starts to take itself seriously a little more than it did during season 1 (especially at the end of season 2 where it shifts to full serious mode), but at the same time, tries to hide it by adding more bullshit on top and even more fetishes.

That’s when the problem I had in the back of my mind during season 1 started to aggravate me, and as Bitch Face continued to abuse Sena, I just kept getting angrier and angrier watching this series. Especially when I started noticing the small social cues Sena was giving off.

Every time you saw that club room on a new day, Sena was always sitting in front of the TV, with her back to everyone else (or her face buried in front of her laptop) playing her dating sim games, the only way she can simulate having any kind of female friendship in her life.

I’m a teacher, I’ve seen these small social cues enough in real life to where I’m looking at this situation and thinking to myself, “this is fucked up.”

I mean, let’s take a step back for a moment. The entire premise of this story is that this group of socially inept students form/join a club to find friends, never realising that they have all become a group of friends.

The problem is that they aren’t friends, at least, not the kind of friends that you would want to have in your life, most of all, not for Sena.

As the series progresses, Sena takes very small steps in terms of her personal growth, as do some of the other characters save for Coward and Bitch Face who are both asshats. I actually started rooting for Sena super hard because she was actually trying, despite her emotional immaturity.

At the end of the day, I just couldn’t enjoy this series any more. I acknowledge that it has some merit in there, but for me, I can’t stand watching Sena being berated and abused day after day.

I’m actually glad that the story doesn’t have an ending with the anime form of Haganai. That way, I can imagine that when Bitch Face ran away at the end, she died like the bitch she is on the way back to her bitch home planet of Bitchfacia. When I think of Bitch Face, I think of this speech given by Krillen in Dragon Ball Z: Abridged…

If I wanted to watch a show where girls berate and abuse each other, I’d rather re-watch Asobi Asobase. At least there, they’re able to give as good as they get.