Review of [Oshi No Ko]

This review contains spoilers. To this day I fail to understand how Oshi no Ko not only managed to be crowned as the highest rated anime of all time on MAL but also with a staggering score of 9.32. I fail to understand it, as Oshi no Ko fails tremendously in dealing with its central themes. It is impressive how an anime from this very year is already outdated in comparison to an anime that deals with similar themes, such as Perfect Blue, which came out 25 YEARS AGO; this last work is written in a much more intelligent, mature and interesting way, it is avisionary, thought-provoking anime and a masterpiece in comparison to the concert of mediocrity that Oshi no Ko offers in every sense, an anime that is dedicated to absolute mediocrity and to criticize the consumerism that this same anime uses in its favor. It is ironic how the show that pretends to show the consumerism in the entertainment industry and the superficial falsehood of entertainers is at the same time a huge waifu collection with a flat as an ironing board personality and with a 2cute4you design destined to sell dakimakuras and produce merchandise; it is also a show that goes from pretending to deal with serious issues to being a melodramatic drama of teenagers soaked in embarrassing & poorly-timed humour with shock value added for morbid curiosity. This show assumes that the audience is stupid and it overexplains absolutely everything with idiotic platitudes; it is fragile, vapid and completely harmless.

Oshi no Ko criticizes what Oshi no Ko itself does, this anime commits the same sins that it condemns in its plot and I believe that this hypocrisy cannot go unnoticed. Oshi no Ko tries to be self-aware, it aspires to be an anime that tells you about how fake the entertainment industry is and how their only objective is to make money when this anime does this very thing in a blatant way. It tries to be serious, cynical and provocative but falls short in any way. Not only does Oshi no Ko bastardize such a complex issue as abuse on the Idol and entertainment industry, it also fucks up bullying and harassment in a specific arc. I'll start with the famed episode one, which boasts the length of basically a movie and was the main reason this anime managed to claim the number one spot on this page. It begins with an off-key dialogue of a narrator exclaiming "This story is a fictional work; in fact, almost everything in this world is fiction. They fabricate, exaggerate and cover up every minute detail that does not fulfill their narrative. Therefore, fans love to be cleverly lied to. In this world, lies are weapons." at this moment, from the very first second, the anime is covered with a pretentious and insulting attitude; exclaiming things that are already common knowledge to everyone who consumes any kind of entertainment; it is not even said in a way that incites an interesting point of view or even becomes provocative, it is already obvious and not worth mentioning.

Saying obvious facts and being tremendously bland and pretentious is a common theme of Oshi no Ko, it is an anime that aspires to tell you "fire burns" and it stands there, with a sly little smile, as if it had just unveiled a hidden truth in the industry to you, when the depravity and darkness of the entertainment industry is something well-known, something that has been continuously fought against and a degenerate sewer which goes much deeper than this anime presents; the attitude of this show and its attempts to be provocative are not only insulting, but it also fails miserably at being thought-provoking or rebellious. After this show of pretentiousness, they proceed to introduce our protagonist, Gorou Anemiya, a degenerate otaku doctor obsessed with underage girls (this is his comedy gag for the next 30 minutes and his only personality traits) and Hoshino Ai, who is the most notorious talent of the idol group called "B Komachi" and is clearly the main light of the stage; Hoshino Ai is also a character who offers no interesting insights into her occupation as such an acclaimed idol and sets out to make exposition dumps and regurgitate information that a viewer already knows or can deduce for themselves. Episode one, furthermore, has a terrible comedic tone, like when the nurse mocks Gotou by calling him a pedophile..., after the death of a girl from cancer, I don't think it's a good time to insert comedy.

Anyways, the two of them (Gorou and the nurse) revive as Hoshino Ai's twins, Aquamarine and Ruby, and this is something I find funny; it's a supernatural element of resurrection suddenly inserted in an anime that pretends to represent the harsh reality, something supernatural that never comes back and just happens without reasonable explanation within what this anime is; also, are you going to tell me that in 16 years, where the two of them lived together, nothing ever came out about this in this regard? Not only this, Oshi no Ko as a whole suffers from tone problems and dissonance; its dark atmosphere pretends to uncover raw facts about the industry but it comes off as pretentious, clumsy, obvious, and the light humorous moments are embarrassing and mainly repeat the same comedy gags over and over again. The cast of characters in Oshi no Ko is tremendously bland and one-dimensional; none of them are relatable, they don't feel realistic and are absolute clichés. Each of them spits out the same platitudes about the entertainment industry constantly, without any interesting or thought-provoking additions to prompt the viewer to think or have a new point of view. From the edgelord gigachad 50000 IQ galaxy brain of Aquamarine Hoshino, who is surely the worst character in this anime (which is saying a lot) and who undertakes a ridiculous Walmart Death Note style cat and mouse story; while this is going on, every now and then Aqua turns to the camera, in edgelord 50000 IQ mode and tells the viewer for the fifth hundredth time "the entertainment industry is fake................ all of these people have a facade and they hide all the details that would ruin their narrative........" and the camera focuses on him as if he were the Albert Einstein of anime or the revolutionary of the industry, when the things he says are not only observable and deductible to the viewer by themselves, but, again, are OBVIOUS things that have already been repeated a million times over. Perhaps I am too cynical, but it is a fact that most famous people in entertainment hide dirt under their carpets and that there are probably still many degenerates to be uncovered, it is something already assumed, much deeper and known.

They introduce Ruby Hoshino who is a classy cliché idol and essentially just Ai Hoshino, Kana Arima who is the talented actress and who, like Aquamarine, spews out expositions of information all the time about painfully obvious things and Akane Kurokawa, a girl who is SO tormented; everyone hates her and talks bad about her because she is SO talented and SO hardworking, everyone talks bad about her and of course the one who should help her is Aquamarine, there is no one else in her life who cares about her more than the protagonist. Anime as a medium often sins of treating bullying as a topic so extremely superficial that it hurts, and Oshi no Ko is no different from them; the bullying towards Akane is treated in an incredibly shallow and flat way, her mental health is also treated in an incredibly shallow way and I feel like this character is just made as a plot device to make Aquamarine into a hero and, of course, after he helped her she proceeds to fall in love; everyone knows the best way to romance the galaxy 50000 IQ brain gigachad is to pretend you're his mother, that's totally something a person would do. I didn't mention Mem-Cho because she is so flat that I can't consider her a character. Oshi no Ko is nothing more than a brick wall with pretty paint, it's pure style over substance and offers nothing new. It is the same stuff puked again on the table, it is a melodramatic and ridiculous teen drama with an immature revenge story pasted as a stamp on top and I'm convinced it's one of the most overrated anime to come out lately; it's immature in its execution and treatment of its core themes. What did I like about Oshi no Ko? The animation looks decent.., there really isn't much else, it's all style over substance, there's nothing here for the taking that's anything fresh.

Oshi no Ko does what Oshi no Ko criticizes, it's a rebellious pretense that goes nowhere and is a vomit of common knowledge about the ceptic pit that is the celebrity world, Oshi no Ko's criticism of the idol and entertainment industry comes off as lukewarm and fragile; there is nothing of real value, this show is steeped in superficiality, pretentiousness and immaturity. For a show that deals with Oshi no Ko's core themes in a better way there is Perfect Blue, which is a million times better in every way; more mature, better directed, better written, better atmosphere, improved in every way, and that came out in 1998, Oshi no Ko could only DREAM of still staying relevant 25 years later. It feels like a show with no soul or essence behind it, it's something without substance and completely bland in nature. It's a show that deals with its themes in an immature way and which fails in all its attempts to provoke the viewer, which turns into a melodramatic anime of teenagers in a high school with extremely one-dimensional characters with super ridiculous revenge story stamps, which at the same time pretends that the viewer is left amazed; but in reality it is nothing more than a compilation of mediocrity, edgyness and obvious platitudes. Not only this, it is also a crude way to make money at the expense of a real problem using marketable character designs and dumb, easily digestible episodes and plot, do not let Aka Akasaka cook.