This is quite possibly the worst thing that I’ve ever watched. I’m serious. I don’t think I’ve ever had a more difficult time watching an anime. You might ask me “Why did you force yourself to watch this if you hate it so much?” The answer is “I don’t know.” Maybe to write this? Maybe so I could complete it again, originally watching it in 2013. Back then, I rated it a 4/10, which was VERY low, considering how low of a standard I had back then. Having an anime that you already watched stuck in ‘Currently Watching’ is annoying as well. Rewatching it, I can see why I gave it such a bad score back then.

Mayo Chiki is a 2011 anime about Sakamachi Kinjiro, nicknamed Jiro, a young man who has developed gynophobia (a ‘fear of women’) as a reaction to his mother, a pro wrestler, and his little sister practicing wrestling moves on him. He doesn’t ‘fear’ women in the way that I can only assume gynophobia normally works, but his body has a violent reaction every time a woman touches him - his nose starts to bleed. The amount his nose bleeds depends on the length and intensity of the touch from a woman. He crosses paths with Konoe Subaru, who is Suzutsuki Kanade’s butler, after opening a restroom stall she was in accidentally and discovering her actual sex. In the anime, Konoe has to pretend to be a man at school, so she can be Suzutsuki’s butler, due to a tradition of a male of the Subaru family serving Kanade’s family. If she’s able to make the entire three years at high school without her gender (sex) being revealed, then she can be Suzutsuki’s butler forever. As much as Konoe hiding her sex is part of the plot, there is very little to do with actual ‘gender politics’ or anything of the sort. I don’t really care about that, but the weird thing is that Konoe has been able to hide her sex for more than a year now, despite her being popular enough around school that she not only has one fan club devoted to her, but TWO of them. One is dedicated to ‘watching’ her with a warmful eye (stalking), and the other are her ultras, who want to physically assault Jiro for getting close to her. Both of these clubs have a good amount of members, but none of them have made the observation that Konoe is actually a girl. In fact, Konoe is oblivious to the fact of these clubs even existing until almost halfway through the anime. I know this is a silly anime, but this is just straight bizarre. After they have a physical confrontation over him finding out her real sex (her wanting to knock him out and give him CTE, him doing the harem protagonist thing of accidentally stripping her), Suzutsuki proposes a deal - Jiro keeps quiet about Konoe’s real sex in exchange for them helping to ‘cure’ Jiro’s gynophobia. There’s no real reason why this deal had to be made in the first place, since Jiro couldn’t give a shit less about Konoe’s sex - the only reason why he accepts is that he’s forced is due to Suzutsuki’s sadistic nature. Other characters include: Kureha Sakamachi, who’s Jiro’s sister that develops a crush on Konoe; Masamune Usami, who’s a member of ‘Shooting Star Subaru-sama’, one of the two clubs dedicated to Subaru; and Narumi Nakuru, who serves no other point than to be a comic relief character.

How is Mayo Chiki one of the worst anime that I’ve ever watched? There’re many examples that I can list off, but I’ll put two down just for simplicity’s sake. In the middle of episode 8, there’s a ‘Battle Royale’ at the summer festival the main characters are at, the winner getting the right to kiss ‘Takanashi Puniru’, who is actually Konoe who is ‘cross-dressing’, who won the ‘Yukata Beauty Pagent’. This sentence out-of-context doesn’t sound bad. A festival episode is bog-standard for an anime, and a main character being the center of a contest isn’t necessarily terrible either. Once you see the build-up to this, you’ll start to understand how awful in execution this anime is. Right before the ‘Battle Royale’ scene, Konoe runs away from the festival for reasons I won’t say due to spoilers. Jiro then walks what seems like two miles uphill to find her, and they have a heartfelt scene, which ends with Jiro passing out after his gynophobia flares up due to a hug. Jiro wakes up an undisclosed time later, in the infirmary of the festival, to his sister telling him that the Battle Royale is about to start. In the time he was KOed, Konoe walked back to the festival, presumingly sweating her ass off carrying Jiro back on a warm summer night, was coerced to join the Yukata Beauty Pageant by Suzutsuki (I assume), won somehow, and is now being shown off at the Battle Royale, which is a free-for-all paintball contest. The confusing part about this is how all of this could’ve happened in what I can only assume in a three to four-hour time span. Going past this - is this scene even necessary? After the heavy scene we just watched, do we REALLY have to have this scene? It’s literally just the main and side characters fighting over the right to kiss Konoe, since the pretense of anyone other than them being in the paintball contest is erased fifteen seconds in. It’s also unsaid how Jiro found a ‘paintball gun’ (the gun is actually a super soaker with paint inside of where water would go), but I’ll let this one slide since I’ll assume he grabbed one in between the time the contest officially started and when he points his super soaker at his sister. The real cherry on top is when Nakuru appears, now ‘drunk’ off of soda. Yes, this bitch gets drunk off of carbonation. Not sugar. Carbonation. And she gains a special power when drunk off of the fizz where she’s able to strip people of their clothes in a flash. This is all happening in the middle of the paintball field, where everyone else is already out of contention by some magical force. Suzutsuki ends up being the person winning. What makes it worse is that Mayo Chiki repeats the whole ‘drunk off of something that won’t get you drunk’, a plot gimmick that’s already used way too much, again. In episode eleven, Konoe, after having a single drop of white wine, undresses and licks Jiro’s neck for an uncomfortable twenty-two seconds. Having the ‘girl gets drunk off of a small amount of alcohol’ gimmick once usually means that your anime is uninspired, but having it TWICE, within four episodes of each other, is a brand-new type of horrible.

The obvious answer to avoiding seeing issues like this would be to do the ever classic saying when recommending anime - to ‘turn your brain off while watching this’ - as you can tell, I definitely did not follow that advice watching Mayo Chiki. The problem is that it’s so blatantly obvious that it’s just phoning it in, throwing out fanservice willy-nilly in order to satisfy the crowd that just wants to see an anime girl’s skin, which I’m guessing is most of the people who’re watching this. It’s the only reason I can reason to myself why the average rating for this show would be 70% on here. To be fair, in the reviewing world, a 7/10 pretty much means ‘average’, but that still means that the average viewer thinks that this is a mediocre anime at worst. Other than being a fanservice goon, the only other reasons why I would assume that anyone would give a good rating to Mayo Chiki is because either Konoe, Suzutsuki, or any of the other girls are ‘their type’. I really don’t get it. Perhaps I’m the weirdo here. Wouldn’t be the first time.

The only good thing I can say about Mayo Chiki is that it’s the first one in and the last one out when it comes to fanservice and ecchi. Even in the middle of what should be a dramatic scene, Jiro can’t help but squeeze one of the girl’s boobs a few times. The only reason you should watch this show is if you’re into fanservice.

I thought that one of the reasons why this anime was so bad was due to the amount of content from the source light novel that it had to cover, but it turns out that it ended at a part in volume five, which would tell me otherwise. This either means that the source light novel is just as bad as the anime, or that feel. (the studio that made the Mayo Chiki anime) were god awful at pacing this show. I felt like Mayo Chiki covered a lot of content since the climax of the show lasted around an episode and a half - which felt half-baked to watch due to how rushed it felt and how anti-climatic the ending was. Compare this to the episode before the climax, where it spends the whole episode showing Kureha enjoying her birthday, and the episode after the climax, which is about Nakuru overcoming her ‘complex’ about her breast size. These two episodes, while probably in the light novel, feel like filler and serve no purpose other than to take time away from the main plotline, which in turn looks barebones and feels pedestrian in execution. Maybe it was just this rushed in the light novel, but I’ll probably never know since it wasn’t ever translated into English. However, the manga was translated and has a slightly higher rating than the anime (at around a 75%). That being said, I’m assuming that those who read the manga came from the anime, which would possibly inflate the rating due to the grand majority of people reading it being those who first enjoyed the anime.

What stops this from being the ‘Worst Anime Ever’? For me, it’s due to Mayo Chiki’s sincereness. At no point does the anime ever try to pretend to be something that it’s not. It’s not ashamed of being a trashy ecchi anime. It embraces it. While I hated watching this show, I can enjoy the fact that there’s no hint of Mayo Chiki saying ‘actually, I’m just pretending to be a terrible anime’ - it does it with a smile. It doesn’t pretend to be smart or a ‘deconstruction of the ecchi anime industry’. This is what saves it from having that title, even though I’m giving it the lowest rating I’ve ever given an anime. It might be the worst anime I’ve ever completed, but it isn’t the anime that I hated the most.

Should you watch Mayo Chiki? If you’re into fan service, then this is your show - there’s no shortage of Jiro slipping and accidentally stripping a girl, shower scenes, girls getting drunk off of one sip of carbonation or white wine, squeezing a girl's breast when you’re trying to find a grip while in the passenger’s seat of a bike, and other examples that I’ve forgotten by now. Otherwise, I can’t recommend you to watch this anime, even in an ironic way. It took me a good month to muster myself through this show, due to the dread that starting up each episode gave me. There’s anime that’re ‘so bad it’s good’, but Mayo Chiki is so appalling that it can’t even be that.