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my first and last episode of gokujo seitokai

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Anime is just like anything else. If there’s a winning forumla, someone will come along sooner or later and try to copy said forumla. In the case of Mai Hime, it’s girls in uniforms fighting mysterious evils at a luxurious boarding school. The wannabe? Gokujo Seitokai. And it fails. Miserably and completely.

When your climatic scene involves beating up a stalker with a hand puppet, maybe it’s a good idea to take the series back to the drawing board.

The setup is that poor little Rino lost her parents to illness, and she’s running low on funds. Her life is so pathetic, her best friend is her hand puppet. Luckily, a creepy old man is willing provide her an apartment and enroll her at this fancy school. (I know, it sounds really suspicious, and it probably is, except I refuse to watch any more of this series.) Sadly, her apartment burns down and her school is filled with power hungry, manically violent lesbians student council. Rino is so distraught she starts beating people with her puppet. I think she even goes into “Seed Mode.”

Honestly, I thought Mai Hime had a pretty ridiculous premise, but it was entertaining, and Mai herself was, uh, bouncy. Gokujo Seitokai just seems like a mess. Instead of making Rino sympathetic, they made whiny and unlikable instead. The hand puppet gimmick killed, nuked, destroyed, decapitated any interest I may or may not have had in the show. OK, I can handle giant robots in my anime. I can handle 16 year old captains. Hell, I can handle giant grey monsters who wait for a cat/bus hybrid public transportation system. But hand puppets? That’s where I draw the line. Bad story. Bad premise. Bad animation. Stay away from this series, unless, of course, you enjoy badly told stories involving hand puppets.

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