Ore no Imouto episode 11

Ore no Okaa-san ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai

I think we may have found the Next Big Thing in anime fetishdom: Appealing to the Oedipus Complex. This time next year, the chart will have an anime called “That won’t help me study Mum!” (warning: serious eww factor. You can direct your thanks to 2D-T for alerting me to that urban legend). Trying to work out if that’s creepier than incest or not. This time there isn’t the fall back of “I don’t have a sister so I don’t know what it’s like”, although you’d probably get people defending it saying “she just really loves her son!”. Yeah, I better get off this topic.

So Ore no Imouto has boiled down to the perverted hijinks of a bunch of teenagers, falling quite neatly into the typical Light Novel adaptation that has become the forefront of the moe world. It’s like MM! from this season, except instead of proudly declaring the male lead is masochist, this anime dances around the possible incest route. To be fair to Ore no Imouto, it’s quite a distance ahead of MM! or any other perverted teenage hijinks anime. Some of the lines are genuinely witty, the animation is streets ahead of the others and it has great characters some good characters Kuroneko. Compared to those anime, Ore no Imouto has actually been watchable and occasionally enjoyable. It’s faaaaar behind some of the other Light Novel adaptations about the perverted hijinks of teenagers, like Bakemonogatari and…err, well just Bakemonogatari. Unless you want to count Durarara as perverted hijinks of teenagers. It has teenagers, and they do talk about boobs and stuff. But that’s probably stretching my newly created category a bit too far.

Second half of the episode was Saori creating a personal harem for Kyousuke, interestingly including Kirino in his harem. Now I suppose you could take this as both her and Kuroneko being convinced that the two have something a bit beyond the standard bro/sis relationship for each other, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s a cultural thing. I figured it was just an anime thing, but when every single bro/sis relationship that both characters are of near enough age to each other has at least one attracted to the other, I start to wonder why it’s so ubiquitous. Maybe that’s considered normal in Japan. That you are meant to naturally recognise the sexual appeal of your siblings. This is a country that seems a lot less squicky towards incest when it comes to cousins, so maybe it’s just in their cultural psyche. It baffles me that anyone can think like that, and I know that you should take what happens in anime as a representation of Japan with more than just a pinch of salt, but you do start to wonder why it shows up so frequently.

As for Kirino’s thanks and suddenly showing an alternate side to her character we hadn’t witnessed once over the entire course of the series, to win us over by revealing her ‘dere side, I roll my eyes at. Or at least, I objectively roll my eyes at it, but damnit the scene was well executed and made me smile regardless. That in no way makes up for the previous 10 episodes of Kirino being one of the worst anime characters of all time, but I’ll let it slide for the second part of this episode. Kuroneko in cat ears helped. So did the morbidly fascinated receptionist, showing again that Ore no Imouto still has the capability to be witty.

If Ore no Imouto made an anime out of the mecha anime playing on the TV when they were in the cafe, do you think they might also release a magazine of Mee-gane? Eh, a man can hope.

This is about where Ore no Imouto anime canon ends. Sorta. What’s going to happen is there be a final episode aired on TV, the so called ‘Good End’, with 3 alternate endings on the DVD release. Which is about the best bloody thing that could happen. I remarked a while back that the Ore no Imouto dating sim had, like any dating sim, several different endings, including incest ends and bad ends. It’s easy to pull such ends with a dating sim because, when every ending is canon, none are. That’s why I thought Ore no Imouto itself didn’t have the balls to pull any sort of decent ending. The one ending of Ore no Imouto would canon, and hence they didn’t have the balls to put anything worthwhile as a solid ending. In a way, they still don’t have the balls, but have worked around that fact by producing the multiple ending version. Now they can actually tackle the subjects they’ve been skirting around since the start. My guess with how the 3 endings will go is

1. The TV ‘Good End’ will be a nothing end. A happy end where nothing really happens. Kyousuke makes up with his father and the world is happy.
2. The true incest end. Maybe the game Kirino gave Kyousuke, telling him to ‘think of the character as herself’ will finally lead him to make a move. May or may not be revealed that they aren’t blood related.
3. A ‘Bad End’. Seems obvious if they called the last one a ‘good end’. Ayase goes into full psycho mode, possibly tying in with the above version of the ending, stabs Kyousuke for a final, glorious, Cart Driver ending.
4. A Kuroneko ending. I will stab someone if we don’t get a fucking Kuroneko ending. She doesn’t even need to end up with Kyousuke. I just want at least one of these episodes to focus on her.
5. *Bonus choice* is the obvious Childhood Friend ending. Could still have all of these if the bad end ties in with the incest end.

The final episodes won’t be out for about 6 months or something, so we’ll be waiting quite a while before I can see how right they are. They could throw us a total curve ball though. We could get the Oedipus Ending…