Name: Vapid cheap and borderline misogynistic lesbian-bait that doesn't deliver anything of worth.
Item: Artiswitch
Rating: 30
Author: EveThePuppy

Waifra

Vapid cheap and borderline misogynistic lesbian-bait that doesn't deliver anything of worth. · Waifora

Content Warning: Lesbian Fridging, Suicide

- - - Intro - - -

I don't like calling stuff vapid. I understand that even the slimiest gooner isekai doujin is made with some level of care, and that the worst anime out there is still someone's creative darling. But I can't think of a more fitting term for this anime. "Artiswitch" feels like a tech demo, and I mean that as an insult. I genuinely don't know what this show was going for. With a scarce six episodes spread over less than an hour, telling a compelling story would be difficult for even the best writers. But "Artiswitch" comes out feeling cheap, pointless, and confused.

- - - The Spoiler-Free Review - - -

The premise sounds great on paper. "There's a magical witch named Nina, people stumble into her store, they have an awkward three minute long music video sequence, and they leave with their wish fulfilled." That's fun. Exciting even. But beyond that I don't have much nice to say.

The first thing that set me off was the visual style of the show. It feels...wrong? The 3D character models - while lovely in their design and beautiful at times - come off as weird and janky. It honestly looked like rotoscoping at times, with how jittery and low frame-rate it was. It was genuinely distracting, and the rest of the show doesn't fare much better. Everything is bright and poppy. Even the somber scenes feel saturated with color. Which is, again, fine in concept. But the "real world" visuals are just dull enough to look odd, and the music video segments are blindingly bright. All-in-all none of it really worked for me, beyond the visual spectacle that was the character designs.

The story is bare-bones, and I can't comment on it much without spoiling it. Suffice to say that, while the premise hooked me for the first episode or two, I think it fell off over time.

And lets get into the real meat of why you're here - the lesbian content and the misogyny. It's very oddly handled in a way where I genuinely kinda despise the anime over it. Spoilers below:

- - - [SPOILERS] The Lesbophobia and Misogyny of Artiswitch - - -

Spoiler, click to view

From the very first episode it felt weird. "Tall lanky boyish woman learns that it's okay to like makeup and dresses :3" felt reductive, like one of those shitty Ao3 fanfics where a tomboyish lesbian is "fixed" by a man. But the show only got stranger the further in I got. The first customer felt like gender non-conformity was pushed onto her. Meanwhile the second felt like general non-conformity was impossible to realize. Meanwhile the fourth and the fifth customers both felt overtly lesbian.

The fourth customer proclaiming that she liked Nina, begging her to "touch her," it all felt intentionally charged. And then she uses her wish to kill herself (sorta). The fifth customer is an explicit lesbian who's crushing on a girl, and her wish is to make her crush happy. And the entire wish sequence is her realizing that her crush never liked her, that she was using her, and she needs to be talked down from killing her crush right then and there.

Is it a coincidence that both of the explicitly lesbian customers both suffer in their wishes and hurt the main character? Maybe, but it feels gross. Furthermore, I'm less inclined to see it as a coincidence once I realized that every woman in "Artiswitch" is inherently shallow.

This is admittedly probably a fault of the rushed format, but it still sticks out to me. It's difficult to explain, but none of the women in this show feel like characters or even caricatures. They feel like children. Every lesson learned here is something you'd tell an eight year old. "It's okay to be yourself," "don't worry about what others think," "it's okay to move on." Even the climax of the anime is resolved via Nina getting a head pat and being called a good girl. I admit I may be overreacting, but it feels reductive! Especially when combined with the earlier weird treatment of lesbians.

- - - Gen-Z Pop Psychology - - -

I found this anime after I'd watched "Welcome to Irabu's Office." It was one of the top recommendations on that page, and both are startlingly similar. Patients/Customers come to a magical office/boutique where their issues are solved through over the top methods and self-growth. Both are stylistically experimental, neither got a full 12 episodes, really it's kind of bizarre just how similar they are.

Which is terrible for "Artiswitch," because watching "Welcome to Irabu's Office" beforehand let me realize just how shallow "Artiswitch" is in comparison.

"Artiswitch" is soaked in modern pop psychology bullshit. There is this grandiose presentation. Customers are treated like patients who need to be fixed. Their "treatment" is to be wished better, walking into a psychologists office and leaving a better person immediately. But the issues Nina fixes are overwhelmingly social issues. Someone is rude and Nina teaches them that being rude is bad so they stop being bad. Someone is unconfident so Nina tells them to be confident and suddenly they are. There's no granularity, there's no human element to any of it. Change is quick. Change is easy.

If you can't change or if you have a significant issue, then that's a moral failing.

In my review of "Welcome to Irabu's Office," I highlighted how well it put a focus on accommodation and gradual change. The episode revolving around a guy with obsessive thoughts surrounding sharp edges isn't solved by telling him that sharp edges won't hurt him. It's solved via giving him eye protection, letting him change his environment to be less threatening, and slowly working towards a point where this fear is no longer debilitating. Healing is a process, and changing yourself takes time. Whether it's the fast pace or the "Artiswitch" being disinterested in change as a whole, I can't say. But it really does feel shallow in comparison.

- - - Final Thoughts - - -

I don't think "Artiswitch" is worth your time. Yes it's only forty-five minutes total, but I was annoyed enough that I spent an hour writing out my thoughts on those forty-five minutes, and I'll probably waste more time ranting about this anime to whoever will listen. If you read it as a metaphor for psychology and healing, it's vapid and shallow. If you're interested in the lesbian content, it's lesbophobic and kind of misogynistic. And if you're here for a sparkly over-animated style fest, then you're better off watching a few vocaloid music videos.

All "Artiswitch" offers is a premise far more interesting than the actual show and a few nice outfits. You'd get more enjoyment out of reading the description and looking up Nina's reference material than you would actually watching "Artiswitch."