Review of D-Frag!

My overall score is more based off my personal thoughts, but I choose to be objective with this one or else I may come off as hateful towards it. D-Frag follows the club room anime tropes you're used to; first and foremost of which is being a harem, as I've yet to see more than one of these have a cast of all females. Second is that the male is abused for absurd reasons. Third is that he retorts everyone around him. Alright, that's the groundwork out of the way and now onto the humor itself. The characters are alright at most, but of course you pitythe male lead by the end of it. The most normal girl in the anime is Takao, who is actually a sincere and honest female (despite how she is introduced) who respects Kenji and listens to his thoughts. But aside from her, all the other girls' shtick is that they provoke Kenji in ways where you will really get angry at them by the end of it rather than admire them, with the exception of Roka who falls somewhere between hate and love. She never calls Kenji any nicknames or picks fights with him, but can also be just as disrespectful to him at times. I consider her my favorite among the mean girls for this reason since she provokes Kenji in a respectable fashion without going overboard (most of the time) and I could find myself laughing at her humor because of it.

And speaking of manipulative, this brings us to it being the kind of humor where it's torture porn, something I've mentioned many times before as a trope that more anime (usually harems) tend to follow. It used to be funny to the majority, but recently, lots of people have been against it since it's not only starting to grow old, but you consider it sad that the innocent character is mistreated so poorly. With D-Frag, you're expecting more of the same, albeit with more original writing in the humor itself which can make it feel more fresh from your typical harem.

There are characters introduced at the start that give off the impression D-Frag is going to be a completely different anime, but it really does jump the shark by transforming itself into a harem almost immediately and discarding the rest of Kenji's male friends, who usually begin appearing when the scene calls for them. One of them bares a striking resemblance to Harima from School Rumble, albeit more sleek. And the other is a short, pudgy midget. Very sad these guys were scrapped as main characters since they could have brought some more life into the anime.

I suppose I should say more good things about it. I did enjoy some of the soundtrack, Takao brought some fresh life into the harem scene and Tama is unarguably my favorite female character among the whole cast and it only saddens me at how little she appears in the whole anime, coming in near the end of it. Her insane personality was a breath of fresh air and seeing her kick Chitose's ass was so gratifying. And her backstory was strangely hilarious. She made me laugh more than the entire anime did and I even had one instance where I had to catch my breath from how funny she was. I'd say she alone makes up the entire half of my overall score, though Takao could contribute a bit to that as well.

We need more characters like Tama in harems. Her vibes, personality and treatment of the male lead never felt too off to me and her design is such an eyecatch. She is the very first character I saw from D-Frag as well before seeing anyone else and I remember asking what anime she was from at one point, but it was surprising to see her here. I had assumed she hailed from another anime and didn't think she would be allocated to a minor character that serves to fill in the final arc, so I was admittedly a strange mix of happy and sad when I saw her in D-Frag. Perhaps, moreso happy due to her lifting my drooped spirits.

My writing here was stale since I wrote the review late and have since forgotten most of what the anime is, but my suggestion is to only watch D-Frag if you're used to the "innocent character gets mistreated" trope in anime. Or, if you just watch harems a lot in general, since you're used to that by default then. I won't say it's a bad anime since it's appealing to those crowds, but for my tastes, I disliked it a lot. Only watched it because it was brought to my attention a lot and the characters came off as likable at first glance.

Only pleasant surprise I got was finding out that Tama was from this anime and I genuinely believe I may have given it a lower score if she was not in it. She felt like a breakout character and only appeared in its final episodes. If D-Frag gets a second season and she's confirmed to be one of the main characters, I'd stomach through its humor again just to watch more of her.