Yuuta Segawa is in his first year of college, but he might not be where he is today if it wasn’t for his older sister, who took it upon herself to raise him when their parents died fifteen years ago so they wouldn’t be separated. Naturally, when she asks her now grown brother to watch her daughter and two stepdaughters while she takes a trip with her husband, it’s the least he can do to help out... Until the news breaks that her airplane has disappeared over the ocean. The three girls he’s just bonded with now face the same situation young Yuuta did... They’re about to be separated among their relatives.

To the surprise of his entire extended family, Yuuta steps up and brings the girls back to his tiny apartment, so he can raise them as his own while continuing to attend college. It’s the four of them against the world as they fight to stay together, but the question they will inevitably have to face is, did Yuuta bite off more than he can chew? Or has the family he’s found truly be the one he’s wanted his entire life?

Listen to Me Girls, I am Your Father... Which I’m going to call Papakiki from now on, for obvious reasons... Does not look like a high budget show, which makes sense, because Studio Feel is not a high budget studio. They’ve had a few projects that sound promising, I mean they collaborated with Gainax on Corpse Princess, which I haven’t seen but which probably looks all right... But the few titles of theirs I am aware of are not promising. I probably only have to bring up Kiss X Sis to let you know exactly what we’re working with here, but remember from my old review, the animation in Kiss X Sis was not one of it’s myriad problems. The same goes for Yosuga no Sora and So I Can’t Play H... Shows that had issues, to be sure, but they look passable at the very worst.

Studio Feel knows how to manage a shoe string budget, which is one of the few things I consistently respect about them. Don’t get me wrong, Papakiki looks cheap at first glance, you can very easily tell that pennies were being pinched during production, but it never really feels like it’s being held back by that. On the other hand, almost everything about this show production-wise looks painfully generic. Every single character features the most basic, dime a dozen aesthetic you can possibly imagine for their respective archetypes, the only exception of which being the young toddler Hina, who barely looks like a human. She looks like the product of an unholy union between Shadow the Hedgehog and Toad from Mario.

One problem it does carry over from Kiss X Sis is the fact that characters’ skin is covered by these weird plasticene shiny marks, little rashy marks that look like blushes, but with white in the middle, like a freshly popped pimple about to ooze puss. And then you have the face designs, which, oh man. There’s a phrase people used to use around the dawn of 2010 called “Moe blob,” and I got through the entire Key catalogue without using it, but it’s unavoidable here. I’ve been an anime fan for decades, I have a very high tolerance for tumor-sized eyes on an anime character, but combined with mouths that form indescribable shapes, that is a tough combination to overcome.

The music is just as generic, just your typical plinky-plink anime harem sitcom background noise, with an opening and closing that are upbeat and happy, but also weirdly forgettable. There’s no dub, which means I’m at a disadvantage here, but I guess everyone sounds okay? Except for Hina, who’s clearly being voiced by an adult. It sounds fine, but honestly, I have nothing particularly insightful to say about the audio side of this review, so let’s just move on.

I was not initially intending to review this anime. It wasn’t even on my radar. I picked it up dirt cheap from a recent Sentai Filmworks online sale, and it just collected dust on my shelf until last week, where I had just finished another show and I was like “Well, I’m putting another collection of anime DVDs up on Ebay, might as well burn through some random title and add it to the stack(link in my profile)." I could tell right away, just from the aesthetic, that I wasn’t going to like it, but I kept watching. I spent actual money on a physical copy, I was at least going to finish it. I had some issues with the plot; The girls being split up felt forced, especially with that whole boarding school deal that felt entirely negotiable... And Yuuta’s decision, which began with literal child abduction(they were too young to legally go willingly) was entirely terrible. Whatever. I had resigned myself to just pushing through, making snide comments online, and letting it go. But then episode 6 happened.

In episode 6, Yuuta is escorting his neices back to their old home to collect their things, when it’s revealed that the littlest girl, Hina, was really popular in an outdoor shopping center. Aww. Cute. She goes up to a fruit vendor, he unpeels a banana for her, and she takes a big honkin’ bite out of it, right out of his hand. Upon seeing this, my jaw dropped, and I practically screamed “OH MY GOD!” As I tried to comprehend what I had just seen.

Sigmund Freud once said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” George Carlin would later respond to this, saying “Well sometimes it’s a big brown dick.” In the over twenty years that I’ve been watching anime, I’ve seen plenty of instances of various phallic food items being used as metaphorical replacements for penises. In Majikoi, the mushroom popsicles were dicks. In Vividred Operation, the cucumbers with a dollop of mayo on the end were dicks. In Girls Bravo, the banana the fruit vendor was selling(what a coincidence) was a dick, and lo and behold, little Hina got a nice big bite out of a fruit vendor’s banana dick too, only it’s not played for laughs, it’s played entirely straight like we’re just not supposed to notice.

It would be an isolated incident on it’s own, but in addition to this little indiscretion, this show is really fucking creepy. I guess I’ll get this one right out of the way, one of Yuuta’s friends is an open, out-and-proud pedophile who makes non-stop creepy comments about little girls, and Yuuta has no issue letting this dude near his neices. The fact that he gets smacked with a fan for saying creepy shit doesn’t make up for him saying creepy shit. The girls are constantly nude, and while it’s TV safe nudity, they still don’t leave much to the imagination. The oldest girl(14) has a massive crush on her legal guardian, who she often sleeps next to and winds up in his arms without fail, and just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, episode ten features that very girl having a sex dream about her younger ten year old sister which then evolves very quickly into a marriage fantasy about Yuuta.

And look, I know what some of you are saying... These complaints, on their own, are nothing serious. Kids get crushes on adults, it happened to all of us when we were younger, it isn’t necessarily a problem unless it’s reciprocated. The pedophile character isn’t that bad, he doesn’t hurt anybody, characters like him are usually slapstick goofballs at best and minor annoyances at worst. Underage nudity isn’t something the Japanese have any real cultural stigma against, and hey, I’m a Strike Witches fan, who am I to complain? The problem is context. The plot creates a situation where these issues just mean more than they usually would.

To illustrate my point, let’s look at another anime that premiered the previous year, Bunny Drop. Bunny Drop is essentially a more wholesome take on Papakiki’s concept. A single dude adopts a recently orphaned bastard child(technically his great aunt, don’t ask, it’s complicated) because his family doesn’t know what to do with her. He raises her in fairly earnest and straight forward fashion, with no real fan service to speak of, being portrayed as a realistic struggling single parent while his charge is portrayed as the extremely rare realistic small child. The series is incredibly sweet, but it ends on a cliffhanger, so of course you check out the manga to see where the story went from there... Only to immediately start looking up discount lobotomy services for yourself. I’m not going to spoil where that series was supposed to go before the anime adaptation cut it the fuck off, but it’s baaaaaaaaaaaad, it’s bad bad bad bad bad.

My point being, if the wholesome version of this concept wasn’t able to avoid ending in extremely questionable fashion, what the hell makes you think the ecchi version stands a chance of it?

But fine, let’s assume for a moment that I’m over-reacting and seeing shit that isn’t there. Let’s assume I’m just pearl clutching, being easily offended, or even ‘triggered’ if that’s the phrase you think will make me look weaker and easier to 'dunk on.' If we take this entire series at face value, there’s another glaring issue here. There’s something missing from Yuuta’s new family that undermines it on a fundamental level, and not only prevents them from feeling like a real family(and yes, I do believe a found family can feel like a real family) but that prevents them from feeling like real people. That something, is conflict.

Family sucks. I don’t think I’m saying anything too controversial here, if you have a family, they suck, and you suck by association. No matter how much you love each other, no matter how strong your bond is, there’s a good chance you would not be friends with these people if you were not linked to them by birth. Personally, I grew up under some pretty decent circumstances... I had a middle class upbringing in a good neighborhood, went to a good school, had mostly supportive parents and a brother only a year and a half younger than me, and I wouldn’t trade any of it for any other circumstance, but there are still fights and arguments I had decades ago that live rent free in my head to this day, and I know it goes both ways. I was a holy terror when I was a kid, an ungrateful, selfish little shit and I wouldn’t be offended or surprised to find out that my parents still have nightmares about the shit that I put them through.

A good family doesn’t just not suck, they overcome the fact that they suck to be as functional as possible despite sucking. So you would think, stuffing three underage girls into a tiny apartment with a college-aged man with limited money and one bathroom would cause a lot of problems, right? Maybe they’d fight over clothing, who’s turn it is to do chores, who’s using the bathroom, or hell, just having to constantly live five feet away from each other and getting sick of each other's very presence, but NOPE! There is not one single argument that happens between these people. Even the toddler, who SHOULD be the most combative of the bunch(let’s be real we’ve all been there) but nope, she’s just happy-go-lucky and hyper. The closest we get is... Well, spoilers, but when her sister has to explain to her their parents aren’t coming back, she throws a fit about that, but she’s almost immediately all smiles again, putting on a brave face for her sisters, which is something ANY child of her age would have difficulty doing.

Of course, figuring out the reason they never fight is as easy as figuring out why most families DO fight... Because they’re made up of individuals, and individuals will always have differences. They’re going to have different tastes, different needs, different religious and political views(lord knows that’s true in my family) and wildly different personalities, and that's not even considering extreme examples involving abuse. None of the characters in Papakiki feel like individuals. They feel like basic archetypes. They have nothing to fight about because they don’t have beliefs or personalities worth clashing over. The only character who isn’t as bland as a bread sandwich is Yuuta’s love interest Raika, a delightfully eclectic oddball who I actually kind of like, and who should have probably gotten more screen time just so she could have spent less of it with the pedophile character. It’s kind of a problem that she’s the girl Yuuta likes, but the narrative spends more time establishing his pairing with his 14 year old niece.

Every obstacle they face comes from an outside force, from eviction threats to a scuffed shoe(no, really) and it’s almost immediately resolved, at worst by the end of the episode it’s brought up in, which is infuriating for a show that is inherently built around a terrible idea. Yuuta is not a suitable parent. The series presents constant evidence of this fact, while never bringing up a good counter argument other than his tenacity and the girls wanting to stay with him. The final episode acts like it’s about to take the situation seriously, but then swerves at the last moment, and just tries to TELL you everything’s gonna be okay despite all evidence to the contrary. All of these factors together make Papakiki feel unnervingly artificial. If your typical family drama feels over-stuffed with sugar, then this is basically that, but with Splenda.

I don’t think you’re supposed to become invested in anyone’s struggle, anyone’s arc, or anyone’s journey. Just like any ecchi harem anime, Yuuta is meant to be your bland self-insert character, and all the females around him are intended to be the viewer’s fantasy waifus. This entire scenario feels like it was constructed specifically for the benefit of all the comments section weirdoes saying shit like “Oh man, I wish I was as lucky as him, oh the things I could do if those girls lived with me...” And again, that’s how these shows normally work, but the fact that half the waifus are underaged AND the self insert character is their legal guardian, it just leaves this skin-crawling sensation that Papakiki must be really popular with the “Raising a daughter is the ultimate cuck” crowd. That is a real thing, do not look it up. In fact, treat it like the manga ending of Bunny Drop... It doesn’t exist.

Listen to me Girls I Am Your Father is available from Senai Filmworks. The original light novel series is not available stateside, nor are the six different one-shot mangas or the PSP game. There are two OVA episodes, one of which is available on the stateside blu-ray.

This show falls under the same umbrella as the Witchblade series as an anime that a lot of people claim is elevated by the portrayal of a strong, heartfelt family dynamic in the face of adversity, but that I ultimately found to be shallow, or in this case, also really insidious. If you don’t see what I see, and you find this show to be an entirely innocent family dramady, like Full House with bathing scenes, if you will, I don’t want to sit here and tell you you’re wrong just because I strongly disagree with you. If it works for you, and you find some sort of value in it, that’s fine, but for me? When I see people online lusting after Yuuta’s nieces and wishing they had the 'opportunity' that he had, I don’t see the internet just being the internet, I see this show’s target audience.

I Give Listen to Me Girls, I Am Your Father! a 2/10.