It's a Teekyuu! spin-off. I'd never heard of Teekyuu! before, but there you are. This episode is a quick-fire throwaway, but it's only two minutes long and it didn't cause me pain or anything, so idle curiosity is probably going to get the better of me.

The title means "I am Takamiya Nasuno". She has big boobs, but dresses modestly. In this episode, she grabs a long-suffering boy called Yota and offers him what she calls a part-time job on her family's estate. That's the plot. More important is the high-speed dialogue that could be said to contain gags, if one's generous and/or easily amused. It's not funny, but it blasts past so quickly that's it's moderately entertaining anyway.

That's it, really. Attempted comedy going at a million miles an hour. I'm have probably found it funnier if I'd been familiar with Teekyuu!, though.

I've seen it claimed that this show is a comedy. I hadn't realised. It just struck me as silly, set in an idol-obsessed world populated almost entirely by unintelligent schoolgirls named after famous detectives.

I can't help thinking that the title must be some kind of innuendo, by the way. No particular reason.

The main characters are named after Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Hercule Poirot and Cordelia Glauca. (I had to google that last one.) They keep protesting that they're detectives, not idols, but so far their crime-fighting methods seem to boil down to: (a) wearing deerstalkers, (b) declaring that some random person is the villain and having them arrested, and (c) waiting until the audience has realised who the baddie is, then wandering on-screen.

The main detective in this episode isn't one of the Milky Holmes girls, but instead someone based on Kogoro Akechi. This in itself is a reason to stop watching, at least if you've seen Ranpo Kitan: Game of Laplace. (Edogawa Ranpo fans will probably now hunt me down and kill me, but what can I say? I've never read the original stories.)

The show has a weird twist in that it's the future, in the "Great Age of Idols" (die, damn you, die) and people have "Toys". These are little fairies with magic powers. The Milky Holmes girls have lost theirs. I don't care about this. At one point a talking cat shows up, while this week's crime involves idols who've had their voices stolen in the middle of live concerts. I don't care about this either. The entire episode is thus about idols, concerts, rehearsals, etc. and the trailer for next week's episode suggests that this is going to continue. Run away!

Someone says, "If you give up now, I'll have to arrest you for breaking my heart." After that, someone challenges Milky Holmes to a game with the victim as the prize. If our heroines lose, the victim will have to stay in the Toys' unreal world! No one has a problem with this and they go ahead with the contest. Oi oi oi.

I won't be continuing.

It's based on a series of children's books, not unlike Enid Blyton's Famous Five, but they haven't started solving crimes yet. This is the set-up episode. They're just meeting each other. The protagonist is the girl, Aya Tachibana, and she's a wallflower with no friends who's hesitant and conservative when it comes to other people. The last thing she wants is to stand out... but unfortunately she happens to be top at languages but dire at maths, so her teacher puts her in a special class for children who don't fit into standard streaming.

She's about to acquire four loud male classmates who just want to be the centre of attention, show off and/or annoy each other. The latter particularly freaks out Aya, who starts quietly comparing her personality flaws with those of her boisterous new friends.

It looks okay. Not brilliant, but nice. I'd probably enjoy it if I watched it, but I wouldn't lose any sleep if I didn't. I'd been assuming that it was a different kind of girls' anime (female protagonist surrounded by pretty boys), but it sounds as if I'm wrong about that. I might keep watching.

...and thanks to alphabetical order, I've now also seen Teekyuu! It's even more manic than Takamiya Nasuno Desu, to the point of impenetrability. If you blink, you'll miss the episode. I won't be continuing, but I might have done had the episodes had a quarter of their actual pace. (In fairness, though, that would destroy the show's unique selling point.)

Ostensibly it's about a tennis club. In practice, it's about four schoolgirls who never play tennis and instead show an extraterrestrial around their school while telling it outrageous lies (ep.37), go to Cambodia (ep.49), something (ep.61) and get stuck down a hole (ep.73). Other episodes apparently have them ghost-hunting, visiting alien planets and breaking the laws of physics. It's just wacky stuff thrown at the audience at a million words a minute for 120 seconds. There's effectively no characterisation, since it goes so fast that it's just a jumble of words and faces.

Well, almost. I think I'd recognise the girl with massive pink hair, at least in the sense of being able to tell which one was her. That's big hair.

It's like being pummelled with punchlines. I honestly can't tell if it's funny or not, because I'd need greater familiarity with the material or lots of pause-and-rewind to be able to process the episodes to that level. It didn't make me laugh, though.

It's animated with MikuMikuDance, a freeware CGI animation program that's popular with the makers of meaningless anime. See also Peeping Life. The formula goes as follows:

(a) hire some voice actors and make them improvise an episode's worth of dialogue

(b) add faintly creepy CGI animation that has lots of body language and nothing meaningful in the faces

(c) broadcast it

This show's gimmick is that the cast are constantly discussing this show in meta-fictional terms. That's all they talk about, in fact. They know this is the third season of Tesagure! Bukatsu-mono and that it's going to be a spin-off that will be revealed to be all a dream in the final episode. This is to allow a crossover with a manga about apprentice goddesses, called Minarai Megami: Puru Purun Charm. Both shows' casts sit around a table together and discuss what the plot's going to be and how they'll structure it to fit around their voice actresses' working schedules. They point out that they can't record their lines individually because the show's mostly ad-libbed. They quip about their character development over the course of this coming season.

Okay, I get it. That's enough for me. I lasted eleven minutes. I can't see why anyone would watch this show, although clearly I'm missing something since it's reached three seasons. Fast-forwarding, I saw a girl drive up in a tank, speaking Russian. She then got out and the show got back to its conversations.

It's just pointless. It's not unpleasant, but you might as well be watching a blank wall. Its director quit halfway through this season's run, which sounds like a sensible move to me. The episode title is "Let's play with female-shaped fighting robots and one-frame manga", which is a lie.

It started off badly, then recovered somewhat. I'll probably keep going.

The first half looked unappetising. The main character, Basara Toujou, has just been told by his dad that he's going to acquire two step-sisters. The older one (Mio) has huge breasts and the distressingly younger one (Maria) likes talking dirty and more or less making sexual invitations. Where's his new stepmother? Overseas. How long will it take for dad to decide to go overseas too? About ten minutes.

Things that happen in those ten minutes:

(a) Basara walks in on Mio in the toilet, as you do. Does he apologise? Does he leave immediately? No, he shoves his way in, clamps his hand over Mio's mouth and tells her not to make a sound. This did not make me like him. From behind, this looks like a rape.

(b) Another scene that has been set up to look sexual. You might think Mio's performing fellatio on Basara in his bed, but she's not.

(c) One "boy accidentally falls on top of girl".

(d) Maria puts porn in Basara's room and asks if he's going to have sex with her.

(e) Nudity-ridden opening and closing credits.

None of this is good. Admittedly I quite liked the aftermath of the scene where Basara saves Mio from harassing jerks, but that's still a cliched story beat.

Fortunately, though, a couple of twists at the halfway point made everything much more entertaining. I won't give away spoilers, but see the show's title. That made me laugh. I enjoyed the way that Mio and Maria can defend themselves just fine without Basara's help, while Basara's dad's thought processes suddenly become interesting. Also "Demon Lord Wilbert" is one of the greatest names ever.

I'm still slightly tentative. It's a light novel adaptation, so you can see the standard formulae falling into place. I'm choosing to overlook the fact that I disliked the first half. However I liked the stuff about family and by the end I'd been entertained enough that continuing looked like an option. Mind you, I was watching the uncensored Blu-ray episode rather than the TV broadcast one...

It's season two. The first season's finale had been odd for various reasons, including the way it had seemed to forget about a three-way war between good ghouls, bad ghouls and the human authorities armed to the teeth.

It's not forgotten, of course. It's here. This episode is more like what most people might have expected from the season one finale than the actual finale. Violent fights against "what the hell did I just see?" monsters. Kaneki cashing in on his badass upgrade, although it should be noted that he didn't get it in a good way. (Understatement.)

It also ends with what might be the show's strongest statement yet of its themes. (Monsters? Humans? Why is my side good and your side bad?) I'm continuing, obviously. This story isn't going to be fun, but it will be powerful.

This isn't my first attempt at watching To Love-Ru. (The title is a pun, based on how the English word "trouble" is pronounced in a Japanese accent.) I got about five minutes into that other episode before giving up. It was all the usual harem cliches, but more sexualised. All the girls worshipped the Bland Male Protagonist (Rito Yuki) and were usually trying to get into bed with him, possibly to the point of attempted rape. I also saw a stupid amount of discussion, angst, pride, etc. about bust size, although I hope that was just that one episode.

Admittedly I also saw some funny SF ideas, a bit like Urusei Yatsura might have been if Ataru had been given control of the universe. It's inventive. Lots of aliens, mostly from the planet Deviluke, have descended on Earth in order to pester Rito. However it was too much for me. I couldn't even finish the episode.

That was then, but now I've sampled the latest series of To Love-Ru! If you watch this show, you can "enjoy"...

(a) A new twist on the implausible anime cliche of "trip and accidentally kiss someone". To Love-Ru's twist is to go for the lower mouth instead. It even happens twice! Rito plants his face in a nude girl's crotch, then later gets his hand inside another girl's knickers. Accidentally. As you do. It also looks as if he's got his fingers inside, um, there. (Was it another girl or the same one? I forget. Well, it hardly matters in this show.)

(b) one of the girls tells Rito that he should marry all the girls for the sake of everyone's happiness, then starts working on this with the rest of the harem. Polygamy is fine in outer space!

(c) On being told that Rito is a pervert, another girl gets excited and starts suggesting that he lick her.

(d) Lots of nudity, nipple shots, panty shots, etc. in the Blu-ray version. The TV version of course is censored.

(e) The episode of course begins with an alien girl sneaking into Rito's bed and being stimulated by him in his sleep. Tails are erogenous zones, apparently.

...and more.

In fairness, the show has energy and jokes. Haruna's big sister's reaction was funny, for instance. "You're doing that this early?" I suspect the show is entertaining, if you can overlook the fact that it's a nuclear missile of sad male wank material. Personally, my problem with it isn't that it's exploitative sexist fantasy, but that I think it's pushed the material so far that it's become disturbing. The blunderbuss sexuality means I can't relate to the relationships. What I saw doesn't feel as if it has anything to do with romance, but just one-sided emotional dependency and a porn-like view of sex. The main thing being explored in this episode is whether a harem would be stable or whether all the girls would be secretly trying to win their polygamous hero for themselves alone.

If you're looking for a lewd fanservice harem show, this might be the definitive example. Personally, though, I think it's pushing the genre so far that it breaks. If you want porn, watch porn. If you want something even remotely akin to recognisable human relationships, watch something that's not To Love-Ru.

This show is about two things: boobs and cool heroes murdering people. It's also stupid.

Firstly, the boobs. This is one of those shows where you're buying the uncensored Blu-ray edition for the nipples. Furthermore all women have monster breasts and are dressing for the beach, be they schoolgirls, teachers or a vigilante combat team. No, I'm not joking. I don't believe in schoolteachers who show about forty centimetres of cleavage in class, or in a hard-bitten commando squad who carry out their operations in swimwear. We also see an underworld boss meeting where one of the "godfathers" is only wearing nipple pads and some string. (Yes, she's female.)

Frankly, the boobs are so oversized that they're slightly ugly. The show's also so keen to show nudity that the Triage organisation doesn't have separate male and female showers, even though it's a hospital. Meanwhile the assassins are all teenagers, yet they don't seem to see anything noteworthy in mixed showering. Yes, the hero is a schoolboy. He has a classmate who likes him, but sometimes he has to leave her and kill people.

Oh, and the crime bosses generally demonstrate their evil by molesting and whipping women.

Secondly, the assassinations. They're not messing about. Everyone's shooting to kill and our heroes have no problem with gunning down henchmen en passant. However their tactics can be questionable. They might burst in on the baddie and his henchmen by riding a motorbike through the window to look cool, for instance. Consequence: a gunfight in a small smoke-filled room with everyone filling the air with lead. We're supposed to accept that no heroes got hurt in that. We're also supposed to accept that these crime bosses have never heard of this Triage organisation, even though what they do every day is whack crime bosses with the aforementioned level of subtlety.

Is anything else stupid? Ah, yes, the bit where the hero gives a gun to his target, then thinks it's proof of wickedness when the man he's about to murder tries to defend himself with it.

It's by the fanservice-loving artist of High School of the Dead, which I preferred to this. I like zombies and I don't like supposedly heroic assassins. Personally I wouldn't even recommend this if you're looking for sleaze. It has humungous boobs and they're often exposed, yes, but I think the show's proud to be stupid.