Several decades ago, the Japanese government passed the “Law for Public Order and Morals in Healthy Child-Raising,” a new form of the more archaic decency laws, that was intended to purify the nation of sexual deviancy and degeneration. In practice, it banned all forms of sexuality from everyday life, fitting all citizens with special neckwear meant to monitor their activity, and thoroughly eradicating all pornography and sexual material. For the most part, these endeavors have paid off, creating a more dignified and all-together sexually ignorant Japanese population. On the other hand, lewdness lives on in the form of various terrorist cells bent on disrupting public order and spicing up the boring day-to-day lives of the masses. Despite his best intentions, Tanukichi Okuma gets caught up in the exploits of a terrorist named Blue Snow, who it turns out is secretly a member of the student council, along with his innocent and pure childhood crush, a gorilla, and... Well, himself, now that he’s been scouted to join. With Blue Snow taking over his life and his innocent crush becoming slowly corrupted, has Tanukichi’s life become tainted? Or is it his taint that’s about to come to life?
Shimoneta was produced by JC Staff, one of my favorite anime studios due to its high level of consistency, even if it does look like a lot of their titles could easily take place in the same universe. Yeah, it doesn’t look particularly unique, think the To Aru franchise but with the slightly cartoony edge of Toradora, but I’ll happily trade originality for quality if I have to. The best part is, Shimoneta doesn’t suffer from the broken frame tactics that their previous titles would often resort to, and it doesn’t go for some headache-inducing hybrid style like Ookami-san did. It doesn’t look like it had an amazing budget, but it doesn’t look cheap either, thanks in part to a pitch-perfect sense of direction and framing. There are some obvious shortcuts taken here and there, but they’re used sparingly and in ways that will either not be noticed(at least if you’re not looking for them like I was) or in ways that synergize with the comedic style of the series. The color palette is dull, but even THAT is used in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible, with the dirty-gray highschool uniforms clashing cleverly against the mostly white attire of the terrorists.
The music is fine, I don’t really have any complaints... It’s used well, but it also doesn’t stand out or stick in the memory. The English dub, however, is outstanding. I was tempted at first listen to think Jamie Marchi wrote the script... After all, she does have a history of going hardcore vulgar when dubbing anime whose own vulgar nature didn’t translate well to English due to their reliance on esoteric innuendo puns... But because nobody was throwing around dated slang, I double checked to find a pleasant surprise. The person in charge of dubbing this show was actually John Burgmeier, one of my favorite dub writers, and someone who has his own history of bringing out the best in Jamie Marchi whenever they’ve worked together, and while I have no direct proof of this, I’ll bet you anything he let her ad-lib most of the dialogue for her character. This is important, because for reasons I’ll get to later, having an ultra-vulgar dub script is probably one of the biggest saving graces of this series.
The rest of the cast is also firmly on-point. I’m not generally a huge fan of the typical harem protagonist, but if you gotta cast for one, Josh Grelle is probably the best choice. These characters usually spend a lot of time over-reacting to stuff, likely in some kind of moral outrage or protest against all the thirsty hoes flinging themselves around, and Josh can handle both the righteous indignation and the subtle, underlying perversion a lot of them are trying to hide. Remember, this is the actor who played Touya from In Another World With My Smartphone, and if that role didn’t convince you that they can breathe life into any stale protagonist they’re given, nothing can. Brittany Karbowski goes full throttle with a character who’s always going off on motor-mouthed, libido-fueled tangents, and she’s used well in the role. Lara Woodhull, David Wald and Mikaela Kranz fill out their roles just as well, but the stars of the show are Jamie Marchi, who single-handedly made the dialogue as dirty as it needed to be with an up-beat and peppy delivery that held no hint of shame or trepidation, and Monica Rial, whose performance as a good proper lady turned sexually aggressive yandere rapist was honestly kind of legitimately terrifying. Yes, I know that wasn’t the intention, it still works.
In the early nineties, Studio Gainax released a movie called Otaku No Video. Part anime, part documentary on the otaku lifestyle, the movie contained segments called “Portrait of an otaku,” where they’d interview several figures from various fandoms. One of their subjects was a young video editor who was trying to invent a way to bypass or descramble the mosaic censorship from Japanese pornography, and while it’s not shown explicitly, I’m pretty sure he was also masturbating in one shot? Now, as you might imagine, this is really difficult to watch, not just because of the subject matter, but because of all the uncomfortable questions it brings up about how society views sexuality, how morals and cultural values can affect the law in different regions, and even how removed people can become from a society that judges their individual needs. If you didn’t know, the Japanese have actual real life decency laws, and one of their tenets is that it’s illegal to portray uncensored genitalia in any form of media, even pornography(a law the United States also had at one point). When you know that, watching this scene feels viscerally raw and honest, and even if the rumors that it was scripted are true, it’s the kind of material that absolutely has the power to haunt your memory.
Now, the reason I bring up Otaku No Video is because the landscape for sexuality in Japan is a subject that fully deserves to be explored, and while quite a few people have told me that Shimoneta is a dumb comedy that you’re not supposed to take seriously, I’ve seen enough dumb comedies to know that they are not exempt from one of the most basic rules of entertainment... Every piece of media has something to say, even if they weren’t intended to say anything. Creators always leave a piece of themselves in their work, and taking a step a little further back, every piece of media is in some way a product of it’s culture. Even if it’s designed after a different culture, it’s still a reflection of how one culture VIEWS another culture. That all being said, Shimoneta is an anime that deals heavily with the same kind of subject matter that I was alluding to in the previous paragraph, so the questions we have to answer are; What is Shimoneta trying to say, and how well is it all said?
Well, for starters, let’s take a look at the title, in all it’s glory. Shimoneta; A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist. First of all, yes it does. The concept of dirty jokes does exist in this world. Even people being oppressed are aware of what dirty jokes are, they’re just not allowed to say them, and while it’s not entirely consistent whether or not people recognize the definitions of words relating to copulation and the names of their private parts, they are aware of the concept. If said concept didn’t exist, Blue Snow and all her terrorist allies wouldn’t know enough about it to fight for it. Moving on a little further, we’re never shown any evidence that the people that haven’t been corrupted yet are bored. The only people we really interact with are the moral authority themselves, the already tainted perverts who join Blue Snow’s operations, and Tanukichi himself, who seemed to be perfectly content with his ‘boring’ life before Ayame(Blue Snow) crossed his path. Nobody fights oppression because they’re bored, or even because of hormones(which you'd have to imagine would be a factor). They either do it because they’re curious, because they're pent up or because their parents raised them to do it. Also, I’m assuming ‘World’ refers specifically to Japan? How does that work? Like, what happens with foreign exchange students who weren’t sheltered from childhood? Do they have to get a lobotomy to attend school?
The entire extended light novel title of this anime is dishonest about the premise to the point where basically every word is a lie. I’ve encountered misleading titles like this before, with one prime example being So I Can’t Play H, but what makes Shimoneta special is that the way that title is worded seems disturbingly familiar to me. Have you ever seen somebody make a bigoted comment online, only to have people call him out for it, and then out of nowhere you have people defending him saying “I guess free speech doesn’t exist anymore!” even though the individual in question isn’t facing any legal consequences at all? It’s the sort of over-dramatic and aggressively defensive hyperbole people sometimes use when they’re trying to make whatever grievance they have with the world sound far more important and consequential than it actually is. That’s what this title reminds me of. It’s a culture war dog whistle that people use to distract you from their own bullshit by making the entire situation about society, or cancel culture, or an attack on freedom itself, and to get a little more specific, it reminds me way too explicitly of any number of comedians who have tried to deflect the consequences of a bad joke on ‘overly sensitive snowflakes’ or even going as far as to label the backlash as actual fascism.
The funny thing about this is, there is an element of fascism in Japanese culture, as I mentioned before, but Shimoneta weirdly never addresses it. The actual laws in the show are completely divorced from those real life laws to the point that they feel more like a bizarre parody of the Footloose formula than anything else. Now you guys know what the footloose formula is, right? It’s when you create a world where a certain thing is illegal for some dumb reason, and then you introduce a main character who’s supposed to spend the entire runtime demonstrating why the thing we all know is good is actually good. The problem is, this formula really sucks. It never makes any gorram sense. They usually rely on some kind of under-written and deliberately unrelatable strawman as the villain of the story, and any viewer who’s smart enough to ask questions winds up tearing it all to the ground. The only somewhat good example I can think of is Avatar, because fire nation youths being forbidden from dance and play makes some cultural sense, but it was still one of the weaker episodes of the series.
In Footloose, it was dancing. In Santa Claus is Coming to Town, it was toys. In Coco, it was music. In Patch Adams, it’s supposed to be humor in the workplace. Make no mistake, in every single one of those examples, the banishment made absolutely no gorram sense whatsoever. Sometimes they’re detrimental to the message they’re trying to convey, or sometimes they fall apart if you think about them for a single moment. Again, Shimoneta is a special case because instead of just banning one facet of human life, like dancing or music, the Japanese government bans all forms of sexuality. This isn’t just limited to sexual jokes, as the title implies, but to all forms of sexual merchandise or media, and even to the far touchier subject of sex education. It’s never made entirely clear when people are allowed to know how babies are made, like is it an age thing or do they tell you at the alter on your wedding day? But it has to be boring being married and not being able to have an active sex life with your actual honest-to-god spouse. Also, if inquisitive minds are able to figure out what sex is by watching flies fuck, what about people who were raised on farms? Has anybody in this country seen animals breeding before?
They burn all the porn, which I guess is kind of obvious, but you do know people can get off to more than just porn, right? We’re shown a clip of a swimming pool being blown up, and we never see anyone in a swimsuit, so has the very act of recreational swimming been abolished? What do people wear in the summer outside of school? What are the beaches like? Does media itself even exist? Did they burn all the manga and shut down all the TV stations? Did they destroy nearly a century’s worth of movies? All forms of media are capable of expressing sexuality, so does pop culture even exist anymore? What about homosexuality? Yeah, LGBT rights in this dystopia are never actually brought up, which seems suspicious to me when you consider that that actually is a major ongoing struggle in Japan to this day. I don’t know, maybe if that question were answered, we’d know a bit more about why the moral authority are the way they are, and where their values specifically come from? Halfway through the series, they try to introduce a next level to their decency laws, and force people to wear chastity belts, which raises a ton of very practical questions. One of these is actually raised when a girl in the assembly asks “how do we go to the bathroom?" But not only does it never get answered, no other concerns are ever addressed. There are so many nagging details about this world that are never addressed, and I think I know the reason why.
There’s a concept in literature called a ‘strawman.’ A strawman is a character who a writer uses to support a message they’re trying to send, by characterizing the opposition to that message as being as unlikeable, idiotic and nonsensical as possible. It’s pretty common in political media(from both sides of the fence), and it usually sends the message that a writer cares more about what they have to say than the quality of their work or the intelligence of their audience. More importantly, though, when combined with the kind of over-dramatic hyperbole I mentioned earlier, it’s a dead giveaway that a writer doesn’t have a leg to stand on, and they damn well know it, so they try to appeal to the emotions of the audience in order to distract from their own logical fallacies through a process of narrative manipulation, and I’m sorry, but I see that shit all over Shimoneta. Like I said before, that segment from Otaku no Video might have been staged, but it still felt far more honest than Shimoneta does. Hell, for the unholy smut people say this is, Shimoneta is surprisingly tame. The only parts of it that I could see getting in the way of a TV broadcast in the broad gorram daylight is the swearing in the dub and maybe one or two brief nude scenes that were probably really easy to censor for TV. Because God forbid this show about the importance of being inappropriate actually DO anything inappropriate.
One of my biggest gripes with this series is that it doesn’t seem to understand what sexuality is, what the possible repercussions of repressing it are, or why it’s important in the first place. Much like Ayame herself, the series seems to grasp sexuality as the subject of jokes, but also seems weirdly uncomfortable with sex on a functional level. Throughout the series, there are two extremes a character outside the moral authority can fall into... They’re either completely sexually ignorant, or they’re corrupted perverts running around wearing panties on their faces, regardless of their gender or sexual preferences. There is no inbetween. You’re either pure, or you’re corrupted, and since every single sexually charged act shown in the series is some kind of transgression... Assault, theft, indecent exposure, attempted rape... Sexuality is never portrayed as healthy. It doesn’t try to normalize sexuality, rather it argues that it’s important BECAUSE it’s dirty. All of this leads up to the most famous element of the series, Anna. Her entire character arc is basically what I mentioned earlier; A good, pure girl turning into an obsessed yandere rapist just because a boy accidentally kissed her. And then she broke the internet by masturbating into cookie dough and serving the cookies to her crush. Fucking Darling in the Franxx did a better job exploring the long term effects of a sheltered up-bringing than Shimoneta does.
This is social commentary on the same level as the movie Idiocracy. It knows there are problems with society, and it’s all too happy to make fun of them, but it’s entirely uninterested in exploring their root causes or actual consequences. It would rather present a strawman enemy, and a bland, lego-brick hero that we can imprint ourselves onto to feel superior. Stories like these are like Master Chief’s suit... They’re not designed to challenge you or make you think, they’re designed to jerk you off. Why does all this matter? Well, they say that in a debate, the best argument you could ever hope for is a bad argument made against you, because instead of having to make your own point, you’re gifted with the opportunity to dismantle the opponent’s argument instead. So yeah, if carnal knowledge has the kind of effect on people that this anime says it does, maybe sexuality should be banned. I don’t want to go through life with random people running around in panty-masks screaming obscenities at the top of their lungs while I’m trying to do my job. And what are this show’s other arguments? That pornography should be available to minors? Yeah, hard pass. That teen sexuality itself be less repressed? Maybe, if there’s a middle ground between ignorance and hysteria where it can be normalized. That teenagers wearing dirty panties on their faces is fine, but a guy wearing women's underwear on his body is somehow disgusting? Get the fuck out of here.
Now, after all that, I’ll bet there’s a sizable number of you out there saying okay, so what? You’re not supposed to take this show seriously, it’s a ridiculous comedy. It doesn’t matter what it’s saying, it doesn’t matter what its arguments are, it’s just something you’re supposed to laugh at. I don’t know, maybe I could ignore some of these issues, if Shimoneta made me laugh. But it doesn’t. I honestly don’t remember how I reacted to this series the first time I saw it, as that was years ago, but for this rewatch, I didn’t laugh a single time, which is kind of weird because I recognized at least one Jojo’s reference. I guess it’s possible that the humor in this series doesn’t do anything for me because I’m asexual, but like, that doesn’t happen with other shows. I thought Prison School was kind of funny. I laughed a few times at Panty and Stocking, even though I liked that show way more on an artistic level than on a comedic one. Shimoneta isn’t funny to me. It’s the same joke over and over again, and while Ayame might have argued that dirty jokes are funny because they’re dirty, I don’t think that’s true. Dirty jokes are like any other jokes in that they require things like wit, and timing, and technique, and I’m not saying this show didn’t have ANY of that, but the dirty jokes are so over-saturated and monotonous that even the ones that could have worked just don’t. I'm not against dirty jokes as a rule, but if you don't put in the actual effort to make them funny, well, they become just as boring as this world is supposed to be.
Shimoneta is available from Funimation. The original manga and light novels are not available stateside.
Look, I understand that humor is extremely subjective. There are a lot of people who laugh themselves silly watching this show, and I would never want to take that away from anyone. I don’t want it to sound like I’m telling anybody they’re wrong for laughing at the thing that I didn’t laugh at. I don’t want to make anybody feel bad for liking Shimoneta, but I’m sorry, I kind of hate it. That’s not to say there’s nothing about it that I like, I mean it’s a really good looking anime, and I like the fact that it’s not a harem, although the only thing that’s really keeping it from becoming a harem is the fact that the overly-thirsty female characters aren’t ALL obsessed with the bland, protesting main character’s dick. The English dub is well acted, well cast, and I appreciate the effort they put into making the vulgarity more accessible for American audiences, but I don’t find it funny, and I have too many issues with the material to turn my brain off and enjoy it. I think I get the humor well enough to understand why some people enjoy it more than I do, but it’s not my cup of tea, and the more I dig into the subtext, the more the over-all product turns me off. It’s not one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, but even dirty jokes can get boring when there isn’t enough variety, and the text of the series does not pick up the slack.
I give Shimoneta; A Boring World Where the Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn’t Exist a 3/10.
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