Review of Pop Team Epic
Story & Characters: 10/10 Pop Team Epic's story is a subject of intense speculation and mystery. It's internal workings and deeper ramifications are barely understood, even to the team of neckbearded, waifu-signalling, 4chan-browsing, basement-dwelling troglodytes who conceived it. It is a loose assemblage of obscure pop culture references held together with spit and cum, and the most fitting analogy for the show's humor and flow is a gacha game. Most of the time, you'll be getting shit. But once in a while, you understand an extremely obscure reference or an insanely on-point parody that makes you feel as if the series is counting you in asone of the "cool kids." You keep coming back to get that shot of dopamine that makes your nipples tingle like a furry at the annual American Kennel Club. Your enjoyment of this series is directly proportional to how many references and parodies you catch, which is proportional to how long you've immersed yourself in this cesspool we call a pop culture. One thing for sure, though is that anyone who rates this show lower than a 9 is a mouth-breathing, soy-eating basic bitch boomer who has been living under a rock and does not understand quirky random millennial humor at its very best. It is a meme that has transcended all boundaries of reason and logic, has become so """"""ironic"""""" that it is immune to criticism and scrutiny. It doesn't have any proper setup or punchlines because it doesn't need any. It is the beacon of an era; the battle cry of a generation. Just when we thought dank memes cannot get any more obtuse and self-referencing, Pop Team Epic one ups the game by being something akin to a psychedelic social experiment, where the result is a joke that everyone finds funny, but no one understands. Everyone is in on the joke, but no one knows what the punchline is, and I dare not say anymore at risk of ruining the punchline if I haven't already.
The narrative that Pop Team Epic is pushing, while taken at face value, may seem trite and meaningless, but if one were to take a step back and look at the bigger picture, the pieces start clicking into place. In the first place, what is it trying to do? To fuck with the audience at every twist and turn, with every picosecond of its runtime. Why does it fuck with us like this? Because it literally markets itself as an edgy self-aware ironic dank meme. It is an anime that parades and ridicules itself on Twitter with the #kusoanime tag to draw attention to its subversiveness. The key visual for the anime announcement literally has the two main characters saying that the publisher for the manga will regret turning it into an anime. And strangely, this form of marketing worked. Not only did it manage to gather the entire japanese twitter community under its banner of flippant self-awareness, but it has also become something akin to an urban legend on western message boards and forums. It has a nothing short of an abusive relationship with its (ironic) fanbase, where everything it says and does is buried underneath so many layers of irony that its true intentions can never be discerned. Who is in on the meme and who is not? Is the season 2 announcement legit or are they just ironically cockslapping us like they always do? The charm of Pop Team Epic, aka its over-the-top self-awareness, has the mythical quality of being applicable to just about anything it does, suspending fan reactions in indefinite limbo, and fans actually like that. This is absolute genius. Every step of the way was calculated, and the marketing and production committees knew exactly what they were doing, even if the people they were marketing to didn't.
Art: 8/10
Pop Team Epic toes the line between pissing on our eyelids and showing us colors for the first time. Just when you think it's settled on an artstyle, it cockslaps you with something like Hellshake Yano, which, by the way, is one of the most batshit insane things I've ever seen in all my years of watching anime. Some dudes actually had to write, draw, choreograph, rehearse, and perform that shit. It wholly captures the flippant style and spirit of the manga, and leaves me with no complaints whatsoever. Actually, I do have two complaint: the BobbuNeMiMiMi segments look like dogshit, and the producers pussied out on the episode length and each episode is technically only 10 minutes long. But then again, both of those are not weaknesses but are actually strengths of Pop Team Epic, when you take into account what it's trying to do.
Sound: 8/10
Sound is one of the departments where Pop Team Epic really makes the most of its medium. The wildly inconsistent voice acting and sound design kept things interesting, and I actually enjoyed hearing some of my favorite female seiyuus like Mimori Suzuko and Taketatsu Ayana scream, shout, and bark at the top of their lungs for a really expensive shitpost.
Enjoyment: 9/10
Overall: 9/10