It’s been one year since the world as we know it was changed forever. Mankind has always wondered if we were alone in the universe, and if we would ever be graced with the presence of an extra terrestrial visitor from beyond the stars, and one year ago, they finally arrived. Sporting uniforms out of a 1970’s space porno with bright, technicolor hair pulled right out of a neon themed crayon box, They call themselves Dears, and they have dedicated themselves to learning our languages and culture in order to assimilate into the welcoming arms of human society! They do hold one dark secret, though... The Dears are, in fact, former slaves to another distant species. They didn’t even escape, they’re so easy to replace that they were just cast off for newer models! This secret threatens to become exposed when one defective Dear is lost, and finds herself in the possession of one average Japanese teenager, who she claims as her master from this day forward! Will this unit, now known as Ren, threaten the future of her own kind? Or is this in fact the one perfect accident that could save them all?

For DearS, we are returning for the first time in several years to a production company called Daume, who I have spoken about twice before. They didn’t produce very many anime titles during their brief existence from the late nineties to the early 2010’s, but I did review Le Portrait de Petit Cossette and Strawberry Marshmallow, and I do really like both of those anime, which I do recall being significantly good looking anime. I believe it was in my review of the latter where I made the observation that your average anime from Daume will not look like any other anime from them, and that they’re probably at least hands off enough to allow the directors they work with to employ their own talents and visual styles, and with DearS, I think my point has been proven.

The director of DearS was a man named Iku Suzuki who also has a very limited resume, albeit a much less impressive one. I’ve heard of a few of his primary directing projects from various negative reviews that Bennet the Sage did on them for Anime Abandon, and from what I saw, other than DearS, the only thing he’s directed that I’ve actually seen was Moonlight Mile. I haven’t seen Moonlight Mile in almost twenty years, and the only thing I really remember about it is that the main character likes to strip naked in front of his coworkers and do the helicopter dick, like if Toby Turner were to do a collaboration with The Lonely Island. Suzuki’s resume otherwise consists of obscure series, even more obscure OAVs, and allegedly terrible anime movies, all of which is one gigantic red flag, and his main job throughout the years seems to be as a storyboard artist, so yeah, maybe this time Daume should have gotten involved a little?

DearS looks really bad. I’m not saying that it has a ton of little flaws that accumulate over time to form a much bigger problem, I mean right from the first glance, this show looks really bad. If Daume gave Suzuki a decent amount of money to work with, he must have visited some loan sharks before actually hitting the studio, in my opinion. You have the basic problems of limited on-screen movement, talking heads, repetitive walking cycles and all of that classic cheapo fare, but you also have constant instance where the animator will focus on a close-up of some random object in the environment while entire conversations and physical interactions happen off screen, and while I guess that kind of thing could be a part of an auteur’s vision, it clearly was meant as a corner cutting technique here. There is occasionally an impressive sequence or two, maybe a little action at certain points in the story, but it’s rare, and you can tell where they cut the budget to compensate for it.

The character designs are... And this is not the last time you’re going to be hearing this sentiment... The absolute worst that early 2000s magical girlfriend anime had to offer. The actual DearS themselves look like a combination of the goddesses from Ah! My Goddess and the Space Princesses from UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie, and while most of you will respond to that comparison by saying “WTF is UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie,” the few of you who are familiar with both properties are probably saying that those two designs do not go together... And you’re right, these Dears look hideous. That’s not to say the human characters look any better, though... Takeya looks like every other generic harem lead ever, and he’d be bottom tier even in those rankings. His neighbor Neneko looks interesting, but she’s still the lesser version of a similar character in UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie. The colors are dull and flat, the backgrounds kinda fade into each other, it’s just not a good looking show.

The English dub, on the other hand, is the exact opposite, it really feels like Geneon was trying their hardest to elevate this material. I don’t know Taliesin Jaffe super well outside of Critical Role, but he does manage to implant Takeya with some much needed personality. In fact, he might have done too good a job, because he really makes me want to feel sorry for Takeya having to put up with the bullshit of everyone around him. I wasn’t so high on Karen Strassman as Ren, she might have been poorly cast, she kinda makes her character’s naivety feel artificial... But no surprise, Michelle Ruff was amazing as Miu. Hell, they should have swapped her with Strassman, as she had way more chemistry with Taliesen. I didn’t like the teacher character, but I did enjoy hearing just how over the top Wendee Lee was able to go with her, that was fun. Same goes with Takeya’s little sister, and how much fun Stephanie Sheh was clearly having with making her sound abrasive and annoying. These ladies both understood the assignment and came out swinging. Good dub, if nothing else.

As a matter of fact, I’m willing to bet Geneon’s English dub crew were the person to touch DearS with anything close to resembling actual effort. I said earlier that this show was the absolute worst that the magical girlfriend anime genre had to offer, but what exactly is the magical girlfriend genre? Well, it was a trend in the late nineties and especially the early 2000s that was every bit as popular as eclectic school club anime were in the early 2010s, and maybe even close to as popular as isekai anime are now. This genre was defined as any anime with the following set-up; Your main character is an average, but somehow down on his luck teenage boy. He is living without his parents to attend school, and he’s either troubled, lonely, or he yearns for more like a Disney princess. He has the two most common friend characters in anime; At least one girl crazy male best friend, and a female childhood friend who is romantically obsessed with him. He lives out his days virtually in stasis, floating through life until he has a chance encounter.

Through some kind of wacky, ridiculous circumstances, completely by coincidence, he meets a fantastical, supernatural, domestic goddess of a waifu. The two of them are bound together by some kind of extraordinary circumstance, and while the waifu is dedicated to her love from the very first sight, the male lead has to deal with the unwelcome change to his routine, the wildly overblown jealousy of his male peers, and constant silly misunderstandings as he learns to fall in love with his fantasy waifu. These weren’t necessarily harem shows, but they had harem elements. If you were anything other than a horny immature male in the early two thousands, shows like this were the bane of your existence. They were almost exactly the same, they were loaded with sexist and misogynist elements, and the main romance almost never felt believable or engaging. There were a few diamonds in the rough, of course... Chobits was probably the best of all of them, although some of the gentler ones like Ah! My Goddess have their own dedicated fanbases... The ones who were really bold with their fanservice, like This Ugly Yet Beautiful World and To Love Ru, stood the test of time in other ways...

But yeah, most of these shows did wind up falling by the wayside, and it shouldn’t surprise all of you that DearS isn’t even in the conversation for which ones are worth revisiting. To start things off on a positive note, though, what do I like about it? I mean, I like the ending theme, it’s really fun and upbeat. I like the eyecatch animations, they’re really cute. I like the character of Neneko. I like the Principal who is always off in his own little world. I already said I like the dub. I like episode ten, which apparently was never aired on TV, presumably because it showed more bare butts and censored boobs than the rest of the series. It was just a full episode of PG-rated fanservice, and it was pretty creative about it. I didn’t like the over the top sexpot teacher, but I liked the way everyone reacted to her, like how even the horny teenagers in her class were all sick of her shit. Mostly, though, I like that this series is a really comfortable variety of bad. There are so many extreme and excessive kinds of shitty anime out there, from the disturbing, to the offensive, to the outright boring, and thankfully, DearS isn’t really any of these.

DearS is bad, primarily, because it was trying to be every other anime in the genre. It was made to chase the trends of the early two thousands, and just coast off of what most anime-watching people were into at the time, and I’m sure it was successful to some degree, but it was not made to last, and true to form, it did not last. This is a kind of bad that’s easy to comprehend, easy to quantify, and if I’m being honest, easy to watch. It’s perfectly digestible because you know immediately what’s wrong with it, and it never surprises you, for better or worse. Yeah, it made me laugh like half a dozen times, credit where it’s due, but for the most part, I’m just watching with a knowing smile like “Oh, I see what you were trying to do...” Specifically, it was trying to be Chobits, but with bits and pieces of other similar shows spliced into the story to make it look like they weren’t copying someone else’s homework.

And look, I’ve made it known that I have nothing against rip-offs before... A good rip-off can really impress me with how transformative, like with how well the finale season of Rozen Maiden ripped off Chobits. A bad rip-off just copies and pastes an element from another anime while adding nothing to it, nor while making any attempt to understand why those elements worked in their previous home. With DearS, Takeya discovers and claims a defective Dear who has no programming and has to learn how to function, so the two of them form a bond while a mystery develops around them, just like Chobits... But instead of examining mankind’s relationship with technology and what it means to be a person and feel love, DearS instead asks a different question: Can a girl who was built for slavery ever love you of her own free will? It’s pretty much the same moral conundrum surrounding Dobby from Harry Potter, but somehow even worse.

Okay, let’s rip the bandaid off now... This show is, in a way, about slavery. This is going to offend a LOT of people, and while I am in no way saying they’re wrong, I’ve seen the same subject matter handled worse. Hell, I’ve seen worse in anime that I actually like. In Rising of the Shield Hero, Naofumi never really gets called out on how his adventures have helped promote and expanded the slave trade. I love the first two entires in Jobless Reincarnation more than most people, but the commentary that Rudeus offered while buying a little slave girl was fucking ghoulish. For DearS, all Ren wants is to be useful to Takeya and serve him, which, I’m sorry, the only thing that makes her situation worse than like ninety other anime love interests is that she actually uses the terms Master and Slave. Also the idea that humans will reject them if we learn about their past as slaves is bullshit, the fact that they’re aliens would be way more of an obstacle.

I would say the bigger problem here is that the narrative doesn’t do a whole lot to develop Rem and Takeya’s relationship beyond these circumstances... For nearly the entire series, Ren misunderstands things and gets uncomfortably sexually aggressive, while Takeya crashes out and yells at her, all so the people around them can always, always, always take her side, brutally scolding or beating him whether he deserves it or not. It never feels like they have any genuine affection for one another that wasn’t forced into them via the circumstances of their union. Honestly, I was kinda rooting for Takeya to wind up with Miu, they grew closer over the series, and like I said before, their actors had more chemistry. I’m not gonna say how the series ends, but I AM going to pretend to clear my throat while saying “Cop out.” Also, there are like three or four exterior characters who are introduced to set up this conclusion, but they’re forgettable as all hell up until the final two episodes... As are most of the things that happen up until those episodes.

DearS is currently available from Discotek media. The original manga by Peach Pit is available from Tokyopop. A playstation 2 video game has never crossed the ocean.

I was told long before I decided to write this review that DearS was one of the worst anime ever made. This was told to me by a friend and beta reading partner of mine from Reddit, who claimed it was the worst anime he;d ever seen, and I get where he’s coming from to some extent, but personally, I don’t hate this. Don’t get me wrong, it’s bad, it’s really bad, but I have soldiered through anime that have tested every facet of my patience before, and DearS, well, I kinda liked it in some weird way. It’s just such an easy piece of shit to get through. I’d rather watch this than Green Green any day of the week. It is a shame that the OVA episode isn’t technically considered a part of the series, and should technically be reviewed on its own, because that episode would have brought up my score for the series by a few points, but as things stand?

I give DearS a 3/10