Of Beasts and Breasts
Let’s get straight to it: Monster Musume is hardly the deepest, smartest, or even remotely most elegant anime under the sun. Quite the opposite. Its utterly idiotic story could fit on a cummed on cookie, the dialogue mostly consists of yelling, scolding, and moaning, and the artwork looks as if it came straight from some seventh-rate hentai dating sim made by obscure Eastern-European hobby developers that Steam throws at you in ten-packs for pocket change. Monster Musume is one of those typical harem anime already told a thousand times, in which a perpetually nosebleeding protagonist is pursued by around ten hopelessly horny girls. Only this time they’re sexy monster women with larger or smaller breasts who urgently want to be mounted right now. Nice.
Three years before the start of Monster Musume, the state revealed that mythical beings such as centaurs, mermaids, and harpies are real and launched a cultural-exchange program. Since then, these creatures have lived with ordinary families like exchange students or au pairs, though under strict rules. Humans, for example, may not mate with them. Enter Kimihito, a typical everyday Japanese fuck boy. When Kuroko Smith, a coordinator of the program and a female copy of a certain agent from The Matrix, accidentally delivers the frightened lamia Miia to his door, he lets her stay. Soon more monster girls arrive, some dumped on him, others forcing their way in, and chaos worsens once he’s told he must marry one of them as part of a legal trial.
In Monster Musume, constantly exposed secondary sex characteristics fly at the viewer from every direction – and often straight into Kimihito’s face, prompting tears, whining, or nosebleeds, usually all at once. Beyond that, the show offers little narrative depth, but that hardly matters. It convinces neither with moving storytelling nor clever twists nor artistic refinement. The show aims for one thing: Fun. Anyone who has ever wanted to see an enraged horse girl with big, wet breasts take down a motorcycle thief will feel right at home. It never gets smarter, yet rarely sinks lower – and in our unpredictable world, that’s worth something. For some it’s social satire, for others colorful fap material. As Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel might say: Why not both?