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This Week in Anime
Tawawa on Monday, Ganbare Dōki-chan on Tuesday

by Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree,

Nick and Steve check out two NSFW series featuring the likes of a fantasizing office worker and the mishaps that come with big ol' honkeroos.

These series are streaming on Crunchyroll

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Nick
Steve, we're coming up on the end of Halloween Month, and I just realized we haven't really covered anything ooky and/or spooky yet. So we need to fix that and talk about something creepy, unsettling, frightening, and altogether horrific: working an office job.
Steve
Me, I've loved horror movies ever since I was a wee tot, but nothing I've seen in any of those has ever filled me with more dread than the feeling I get opening Outlook every Monday morning.

Do not perceive me. Do not email me.
That's right, this week we're putting the BOO in Boobs and showing why Frights rhymes with Tights. It's a double fetish feature of anime shorts.
Now this is perfect, because it has come to my attention that certain sects of the ANN audience perceive me as some kind of notorious hater of horny. A filth flagellant. A panner of the perverse. When that couldn't be further from the truth! I mean, the very first TWIA column I ever did—and that I specifically requested to do—was for a show literally called NTR. So obviously this is a serious issue and I need to rehabilitate my image ASAP.

And this is doubly perfect because, outside of the show I'm covering for weekly reviews, literally the only anime I'm caught up on are Ganbare Douki-chan and Tawawa on Monday.
So these shows are...weird. Not in their content, but in how they came to be in the first place. Most anime start life as traditionally published manga or games, maybe some originals. But both of these series started life as Extremely Specific Fetish Art their creators posted on Twitter, which somehow spiraled into full-blown short-form anime.
Yeah, starting with the older of the two series, Tawawa on Monday began life in 2015 as a weekly series of pinups that Kiseki Himura posted on their Twitter account. They gained a reputation both for their trademark blue monochrome and their emphasis on massive Monday mammaries, and eventually they coalesced into a series of recurring characters and ongoing plots. And now we're somehow on the second season of the anime. Turns out people like large breasts a lot.
I'll give Tawawa this: it knows what it's about and never falters from that role. You want to see anime boobs as large as the head of the girl they're questionably attached to? You have roughly an hour of nothing but that to sate yourself with.
I mean, I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy who values honesty, so I definitely respect the earnestness on display here. And the accuracy! We've all seen a guy get clocked by anime knockers before, but so few series dig into the painful reality of the head trauma that necessarily follows.
A pair of anime boobs traveling at that speed can deliver a concussive force equal to a pile bunker, so he's honestly lucky his grey matter isn't seeping into her décolletage right now.
On that note, I'm glad Crunchyroll finally added the first season, because this scene adds a lot of credence to my ongoing theory that the entire show takes place in this guy's coma, his few remaining synapses slowly burning themselves out as he dreams of high school girls with honkin' baps.
Honestly I'll take that over the actual story, which is essentially just a ripoff of this brilliant elevator pitch by noted writer/director saturdaynightbigcocksalaryman:
And not in the least bit exaggerated! This is the crux of every 5-minute episode, so if you don't have patience for a pure fanservice vehicle—or if you don't find it amusing in its bald-facedness—then you're not going to get anything out of it. Nevertheless, the anime has actually been able to surprise me on more than one occasion. Like the time the animators painstakingly recreated a scene from Castle in the Sky just to set up another boob joke.

Honestly the fanservice is the least of my issues with Tawawa. I've been watching anime for the majority of my life by now. I've seen enough tiddy shows to be desensitized to all but the most back-breaking of anime mommy milkers. My problem is more that it fetishizes its main heroine's youth just as much as her chest.
It's an issue that unfortunately the adaptation exacerbates. The original "manga" is just dialogue-free pages with a caption, but stringing these together into a coherent production means we have to treat the audience insert like an actual character. However, all we have is a faceless creep, and hearing his thoughts and perspectives voiced just sucks.
There's also just like, a really dark undertone to it that feels unintentional? We first see "Onii-chan" when he's just contemplating how much he hates going to work on Mondays, to the point where one of his first lines is an intrusive thought about suicide. And the message of the first few episodes is that he's saved from this by finding romance with a 10th grader where their only conversations revolve around her boobs.
And for the record, I genuinely have no problem with fiction exploring these kinds of taboo relationships, especially when the fiction in question is so self-evidently meant to titillate. But the faceless protagonist thing, especially in sound and motion, just always takes me out of the moment. Like, they're ostensibly trying to make it so anyone in the audience can imagine themselves talking to a bustily-blessed high schooler, but that's not how fiction works. Own your trash! Have the conviction to create an actual character!
That's also a part of the problem. The obvious self-insert essentially assumes that you, the viewer, also fantasize about returning to high school, and I absolutely do not. Adult life has by and large been the most healthy and happy chunk of my life so far, so the romanticizing of middle/high school and "youth" is totally anathema to me.
Also, if you're skeeved out by an adult pseudo/deffo-romancing a high schooler, trust me, it doesn't get any better as it goes on lol.
I'll give them credit. They technically waited until Maegami-chan graduated. Barely.
Literally the exact night of graduation, but hey, that's something.
And yes, because nobody but Ai gets actual names here, her fan-accepted nickname is just referencing her bangs.
And, additional credit where it's due, I respect Tawawa for not resting on its boobily-breasted laurels, creating a character whose main charm point is her overly-long bangs. There's some real Vision at work there.

And, true to her name, out of the entire cast, she does indeed end up being the one who bangs the most.
I mean she does still have water balloons on her torso. In this world you're not allowed to have a face until you develop an H-cup. As seen with the guy who ends up sort-of hooking up with his middle school crush in one episode.
The other main set of recurring characters are a pair of office workers, one male and—you guessed it—faceless, and one buxom and adept with ID cards.

The guys all lacking eyes gets honestly comical once two of them are on screen together. When Onii-san and Sensei turn out to be neighbors you can just see the cogs going through their head as they both recognize the tell tale mark of almost-statutory.

It's like the Same Hat meme but they're both dating teenagers.
As much as I might have critiqued it earlier, the fact that Tawawa's commitment to self-inserts leads to these surreal moments actually makes it worthwhile imo. This, in its own weird way, is a kind of commitment, and it's why I keep watching shows like this. You just don't get this content anywhere else.
They do at least only use POV shots sparingly, mostly to recreate pinup shots from the source material, so it's never as genuinely uncomfortable as, say, One Room where it could feel like you were literally trapped in a room with an anime girl. Though they do start to run out of new angles to look at boobs from eventually.

That last shot especially gives new meaning to the technique "rack focus."
Look if you want to push the envelope with horny direction, do what How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord did and frame a shot from the inside of a catgirl's butthole, cowards.
However, as brilliant as that shot is, I'm still a little disappointed in the anime. The second season is a noticeable step up from the first, but it still has issues. Kiseki Himura is legit a very talented artist, and they especially have a good grasp of how clothing interacts with ginormous jugs. They avoid the "boob sock" phenomenon and generally do a good job of showing how the fabric folds and stretches. The anime, though, takes a lot of familiar liberties with its breast physics, which detracts from Himura's attention to realism. As part of a discerning audience, I think we deserve better from our tasteless fetish shorts.
Let's be real there were still some questionable physics in those illustrations.
Okay an artiste must be allowed certain liberties.
I can't recall if that original picture was what kickstarted that particular art meme, but Tawawa does have a different boob-balancing "challenge" to its name, specifically announcing this very anime! The internet is weird like that.
I actually researched this earlier today and the phone-balancing thing was 100% Tawawa's fault. Considering how wide that meme spread, truly, its genius knows no bounds.
And guess who brought it back just to announce their own anime:
Good ol' yom, perhaps better recognized as Twitter's unofficially crowned Tights Pervert, is indeed back at it again. They already had the Miru Tights anime a couple years past, but now they've returned with the weekly misadventures of one very hapless office worker.
Right away, Ganbare! Douki-chan is way more my speed. In part because it took all the animation resources Tawawa devoted to tiddy and dumps it into a very respectable Face Game.
I don't think there's another franchise in existence that makes me feel as sickos.jpg as this one, and it's all thanks to the constant ownage wrought upon the titular Douki-chan.
So the setup for this one is nominally more complicated, but still pretty simple. You've got Douki-chan who's got a big ol' crush on her coworker, but just can't bring herself to admit it and keeps trying these passive-aggressive ways of getting him to jump her bones. This literally never works, and has been updating weekly for over two years. It's great.
You can tell that yom, after experimenting with their prior characters, definitely took cues from Tawawa on Monday in making their own serialized Twitter story here. And I love it! It's exclusively about adults in the workforce, the OL aesthetic literally has zero faults, and the main character does nothing but hoist her own petard. Exquisite stuff.

Also, never fear, you can't take the tights away from the Tights Pervert.
Honestly I'm just glad yom is a connoisseur of more than one brand of horny. After seeing an hour straight of jiggling chesticles, it was refreshing to just see a butt as a change of pace.

It's not even a particularly great butt (Sorry, Douki-chan) but by god it's something different.
Douki-chan suffers from a lot of the same issues as Tawawa—its genesis as pinups means that the anime loses something in its failure to recreate the detail and fidelity of the original illustrations. But there's also a bit more meat on Douki-chan's proverbial bone, so it works a little better in bite-sized chunks. And Douki's just a fun schadenfreude-laden character. Look at all that ear-blush! It's unconscionable! I want more!
Something that didn't really occur to me until watching these shows back to back is that despite also being based on pinups framed from a faceless self-insert's literal point of view, Douki-chan distinguishes itself by making Douki the character the audience is asked to relate to. We see most scenes from her point of view, hear her inner thoughts, and even the episode titles are written from her perspective.

It's a subtle difference, but it goes a long way in making all the fanservice feel less voyeuristic compared to Tawawa. And also it lets us know Douki is constantly dreaming about getting railed in an elevator.
God, it's such an improvement, and it contextualizes so much. Like, ostensibly, Douki is still enamored with the faceless self-insert character, so that's all fine and supposedly dandy. But there are subtleties in making her the POV character! For example! All of her jealous fantasies about the dude banging someone else can quite easily be read in a different context.


"Oh shit, I'm gay."
Ah yes, the series' most popular character: Satan.
There are additional characters who will be introduced (a new one next week, bee tee dubs), but Kouhai-chan here is the most evil and consequently the best.
She's not even that evil. She just knows a good, faceless male lead when she sees one and doesn't mince around with showing her interest. It's not her fault she has a face crafted after the serpent in the garden.
And, again, because she so quickly emerges as Douki's preeminent romantic rival, Douki constantly imagines her being split down the middle, which is both Cool and Normal, for girls.
Really, they don't need to be rivals, since Douki has plenty she can learn from Kouhai-chan (Yes, again, that's just how names go in these shows). For instance: it's important to tell your potential partner what you want out of a relationship.
I mean, Douki kinda gets there, with a little bit of feline help.

That's what happens when you let your pussy do the talking.
By the way, if you're thinking "hey, that'd be a perfect place to slot in some 'Roundabout' by Yes," let me cut you off there—the anime is way ahead of you.

That image is not altered in any way.
These anime basically exist solely thanks to being Extremely Online so I'd expect nothing less.
Live by the meme, die by the meme.
In the end I think that aspect actually interests me more than either show on their own. These, along with some other properties, represent a particular kind of creator-fandom osmosis that only really exists in anime and its adjacent subcultures. These went from viral art posts on social media to full-blown anime with merchandise and tie-in manga in just a few years. That's crazy.
Yeah, I mean, both of these artists are talented at what they do and had audiences prior to the creation of these franchises, but it's still wild to consider how we got here, with simultaneous anime shorts being simulcasted internationally. For better or worse, a large enough audience has become invested in both Tawawa and Douki-chan, and fetish-based or not, I think there's something beautiful there.

Also, both yom and Himura have already collaborated on a joint manga venture, so the Tawawa-Douki-chan extended universe is a very real thing.
That's pretty cute, but my question is, when are we gonna get a Skateboard Maids anime?
If past precedence means anything, it's only a matter of time.
My prayers will continue until then.
Where there's an extremely specific will, there's an extremely specific way.
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