A great self-healing anime plagued with fan service

Having just finished Onimai and heading to see reviews, I felt that most people have judged this anime way too harshly, and overlooked the message behind the anime

Mahiro Oyama is a middle-school drop out/shut in that has resolved to staying home and playing videogames, avoiding every social interaction, spiraling torwards self-isolation. Seeing this, his sister, Mihari Oyama, made a special potion that would turn him to a middle-school girl, with the hope of helping him,now her, turn her life around. In the anime, we see Mahiro's everyday life, getting accustomed to the life of the opposite gender and coming to terms with it. She starts to open up mpore and more to her sister, starting to be more and more responsible and starts to build more self-confidence about themselves. Day by day, we see the progress Mahiro makes to go from a shut-in to a more sociable and confident person. It's a great message that even now, if given the chance, with small steps you can better yourself and get back to the life that you tossed away.

Unfortuately, with great anime comes great fan service. Every episode is riddled with fan service, going from forcing Mahiro to dress up to close ups of weird tension between characters where it is implied that something weird is happening, till the frame pans out to reveal a more innocent act. Unfortunately, despite the anime clearly having great message to teach and a rich story behind it, for some reason, the directors have this idea that the anime won't perform to their expectation, so they add fan service to please an audience that isn't suited for this anime. It seems to be a trend amongst lots of great anime like my dress up darlin and gleipnir. I always tend to skip over very lewd scenes and my only justification around it is that it's probably a difference in culture between the west and japan. From japanese reviews that I read, none of them mentioned any displeasure or annoyance to the fan service in the anime.

Though, I feel that some of the scenes that are characterised as fan service are needed. When trying to better yourself, you need to get out of your waters and make some big steps torwards your goal, much like how Mahiro was forced to dress up to get used to feminine clothing, going for a haircut and being forced to take care of her hair to learn to take care of themselves or being forced to go back to school and be exposed to new enviroments.

As for the lewd thoughts from the main character afterwards, I think we need to go try and look at it from the characters perspective. Mahiro's exact reasoning for why they became a shut-in isn't exactly shown, much like a lot isn't known Mahiro's past. The only thing we know is that, Mahiro when he was young used to be more appreciative and caring torwards his sister, taking baths with her, giving her a hairclip as a gift etc. Growing up though, seeing the success of her sister, getting good grades, climbing classes and the praise torwards her, made him feel useless. Being the older brother he was to be expected as the one taking care of his sister and influencing her to be better. Alas, he ended in his sister's shadow, seeing her advancing more and more , while he gets worse and worse. I think all those together could be the reason for Mahiro's weak character. His fixation to pervy manga and games could be his coping mechanism to get back his masculinity. After the transformation, we see that she tries to break her old habits as a man, and one of those is his appeal to the female body. In the start, its clear that she is still coming to terms with it, making mistakes like, peeing standing up, sitting down as a man, despite wearing a skirt. We can see that she is slowly transforming her thoughts to be more feminine and to do that she needs to make mistakes.

In summary, I believe that the anime has a great message that is trying pass along, showing to the viewers that a new change isn't bad, even through its weird way. It's just that the anime is plagued with the common virus that is fan service. I believe that the producers should be more confident in the show's story and overall meaning and to stop appealing to a wider but not correct audience when they fear that the show is gonna fail. Though, if it means that we will get a 2nd season, I'm willing to overlook it. It gets a 7/10 from me