Review of AHO-GIRL

Well, this was certainly a strange one. I can't really put it into words, but I have to since I decided to make a review of it. I will have to do my best to describe characters without spoiling too much, but as soon as certain characters are introduced, you're already pretty familiar with them, so there's not much to spoil for an anime like this. Aho-Girl is one of the most peculiar anime I have seen in a while. It follows the blatantly bizarre adventures of Yoshiko as she attempts to make the life of her childhood friend, Akutsu, a living hell. And it seemsto take a liking to latching onto common mental illnesses or idiosyncrasies that are found in certain humans; of which, Yoshiko exploits quite frequently, often inadvertently, as she often does so well she's expressing her curiosities on certain matters.

Yoshiko has one friend at school, Sayaka, who seems to have a strange attachment to Yoshiko where she will tolerate everything she puts her through just to see if it makes her a better person, despite how much it bemoans her. And she is willing to even shatter the mentality of the few sane people in the anime, such as Akutsu, whom she was willing to call a sadistic and rude person for not going on a trip with her to the beach, being completely oblivious to the hell Yoshiko puts him through everyday. I am uncertain how her character complements the anime, but as I go on, it's hard to really grasp how they use character archetypes at all.

The last significant character in the anime who regularly appears in Yoshiko's group is Fuuki, whose obsession with Akutsu results in her completely losing her common sense and doing absurd things on the whim of Yoshiko. She is very visibly tsundere, but is also mildly insane. At one instance, Sayaka had an intervention with her and nearly shattered her mentality by telling her that everything she was doing to Akutsu was wrong. She then said "just kidding" and immediately reverted Fuuki back to her ludicrous nature.

Besides those three girls, other characters are often swept up into the mix and their mental problems, too, are often obvious and out in the open. It's really an anime where, as you continue watching, you go "who will Yoshiko mess up next" and the result is almost always the same. She meets someone, they come off as a pretty normal person and Yoshiko, through the sheer willpower of her curiosity, manages to break them. Even her own mother has some messed up things about her, though you would expect that due to the nature of Yoshiko herself.

And even poor Akutsu is not alone. Probably the most sane out of the entire cast, his problem is that he became a sadist thanks to Yoshiko not enduring any of his punishments and him believing there's genuinely no hope for her. His is the only one you can't really get mad at since he was driven to it out of the overbearing nature of Yoshiko taking advantage of his generally weak physique and literally abducting him to go play. And at one point, even physically raping him by making out with him for a quarter of a minute, well they were both still children. The worst part is that, even after stressing his body to its absolute limits to get stronger than her, he wound up getting sick and was unable to achieve his goal until he got much older, where the mental wounds had already begun to lie dormant.

I still am unsure if I can even recommend this anime to anyone, but one thing is for sure, you should avoid recommending it to anyone who is still new to anime or else they may or may not be ruined by Aho-Girl since it could either make someone fall in love with the stuff or hate it. Truly, even after writing all of this, I am at a loss of words and can not properly describe what the anime's goal is. It's just Yoshiko having fun and messing people up. But, I can't deny you will laugh a ton well watching it.