Gabriel DropOut
-subbed
Story:
Gabriel DropOut is the about the daily life of a lazy angel, a friendly demon, a sadistic angel, and a megalomaniacal/incompetent demon going to high school in Japan. Honestly it's not that original as far as character personalities and activities go. That's not to say it isn't entertaining, just that it's nothing I haven't seen before with minor variations. The real standout episodes are 9 and 10 where they actually use the premise for something original, the Christmas party and the scenes in Heaven & Hell being pretty entertaining and making me wish more time was spent in those locations. I do like the idea that Heaven is super boring compared to Earth, due to its excessive wholesomeness. One thing the show gets right on numerous occasions are visual gags that it doesn't draw much attention to which makes them hilarious. Anyway, there isn't really much else to say, so I'll move onto characters.
Characters:
Gabriel-
The show's titular character, she's the star student at her school in heaven, but quickly devolves into a messy and lazy shut in obsessed with MMOs once she starts living on Earth. Her deadpan attitude is pretty entertaining she's kinda like a combination of Tomoko (Watamote) and Umaru (Himouto Umaru-Chan). As an aside I really appreciate the lack of upskirt shots despite her wearing a red jacket with no pants a lot of the time, it shows that her design was done for character purposes and not fan service.
Vignette-
A character named Vignette in a show focused on comedic vignettes, hmmmm. . . Anyway Vigne as she's most often called is Gabriel's best friend and a demon who acts like an angel to directly contrast Gabriel. She's a pretty likeable character, although I question how she made it to high school when she constantly fails to act like a demon. She's probably my favorite of the cast.
Satania-
A, stupid, megalomaniacal, wannabe archdemon whose repetitive gags get so old that you want to slam your head against the wall repeatedly by the end of the 3rd episode. She's obnoxious, which she's supposed to be, but it's also supposed to be funny which to be fair she does have a number of good scenes, but the running gag with her shouting out her name and the dog stealing her bread get really really old.
Raphiel-
A sadist who puts on the air of being a role model of an angel. She constantly laughs at others misfortunes. Also boobs.
There's a couple side characters as well, but for the sake of brevity and not boring you I'll leave it there.
Animation:
I'm going to start out talking about something I've never really discussed before and that's character design. I immediately noticed that Gabriel and Vignette looked a lot like Umaru and Ebina (Himouto Umaru-Chan) respectively and Satanica was pretty reminiscent of Riko (Love Lab) well a quick check of MAL showed that this was done by the same animation studio, Doga Kobo. So what's my point? Well it's just kinda distracting, not enough for me to detract points from the final score, just distracting. I wrote that when I first started watching, for most of the show Gabriel looks damn near identical to Taiga from ToraDora which ,again, is distracting but certainly not worth docking a point.
The animation just generally looks like a Doga Kobo show, jumpy, comedic animation. It's colorful and lends itself decently well to comedy, but certainly isn't on par with Kyoani, which yes, I do have a massive hard on for them.
Music:
The OP is decently, and the chorus is relatively catchy, but nothing too special. The ED is downright forgettable. The music in the show is nothing to write home about either.
Overall:
I may have come across like I didn't like this show very much, and while I certainly don't love it, it's still a decent show that held my attention and made me laugh a few times. Now mileage always varies on humor and some people may absolutely love this show, but I'm not one of them.
5/10
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