My One-Hit Kill Sister – Episode 1

Content Warning: Gore (the show starts with graphic images of a town getting slaughtered), incestual affection, fanservice, sexual harassment, suicide as comedy

What’s it about? Ikusaba Asahi is your average Japanese teen transported into a fantasy world after he saved a little girl from a car accident. A complete gamer nerd, Asahi is at first enchanted with the prospect of starting a new life of status menus and localized language accessibility options, but quickly finds out he has no discernable strengths whatsoever save for his situational awareness. In comes Maya, Asahi’s older sister, who followed Asahi into the world by bashing her head against a wall repeatedly. Unlike Asahi, Maya has power beyond those of the gods and can strike any foe down with one hit; her love for her little brother is just as strong. One thing leads to another and Asahi is caught in a web of lies where he must rely on his sister’s power to hide the fact he’s incredibly weak.

---

I’m an only child, and so I never understood the instinctive revulsion actual siblings have over the thought of snogging each other. Yet, I also fully understand that incest is, by all accounts, not great. You could argue I got to understanding this concept with Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?, but that show—zany as it is—toes the line with the silent acknowledgement “actually fucking your own mom is poor form” (OVA not withstanding).

And along comes My One-Hit Kill Sister, boldly telling folks: incestuous sexual harassment is funny actually.

Maya’s undying love for Asahi, however, is a one-note joke. We get it, she loves her brother. Say anything mean about him, she’ll kill you in a gory display. She wants to smooch him, but he finds it kinda gross. It’s funnuny.

The writing exemplifying this central premise isn’t particularly clever, almost played straight like in the opening scene of A Sister is All You Need, but without a hint of irony despite the show runners seeming to be aware that this premise is horribly taboo.

What the show at least does is make Asahi aware he’s in a stereotypical setting; which is actually kind of obnoxious, actually, because he won’t shut up about the fact he’s a huge nerd.

Yes, Asahi, everyone in this new world speaks Japanese. The guild receptionist is a gyaru who isn’t repulsed by nerds like you. You can open your status screen and look at your vitals and skill lists. You can do all the tropes to prove you are, in fact, in one of those popular “isekai animes” and loudly proclaim “I’d really thrive if someone stuck me in Ready Player One.”

You’re the Japanese equivalent of that nerd who got really into The Walking Dead and swore you’d be able to survive the zombie apocalypse because you watched every zombie movie and show they made in the early 2010s.

In other words, Asahi is a loser, but the show doesn’t want to necessarily admit it that loudly, and instead hopes to distract you by having you focus on Maya, who’s essentially introduced crotch-first in the show’s cold-open.

Asahi feeling somewhat grossed out by his sister’s advances helps keep the show away from just openly having sibling snogging on screen from episode one, but Maya’s affection is rather unhinged to say the least. Her constant wish for skinship and her total disregard of others in service to her brother aside, she did essentially put herself in a coma to chase after her brother when he became comatose from the accident back home. The bit is played as a joke.

All of this, Asahi sees and acknowledges. He’s aware everything is kind of fucked up, and the showrunners are trying to be “on the nose” from the looks of it. Yet, none of it lands when the tropes feel dragged out and old-hat from the get-go. The fact of the matter is, incest taboo sisterfucker shows aren’t that new. Isekai tropes aren’t that new. Sticking them together doesn’t necessarily make something new and refreshing, especially when you let both sides masturbate in their respective corners. There’s no real innovation here, and that makes this show commit the cardinal sin worse than incest: it’s boring.

The main pair aside, the show has a number of side characters introduced, and most of them aren’t worth mentioning. I will flag the weirdly horny guild receptionist, however, as she acts like she’s about to take Asahi’s virginity rather than register him as an adventurer when they first meet. Nothing she does is lewd, she just talks like a stereotypical fictional sex worker guiding a flustered virgin through his “first time.”

Production-wise, the show at least has some nice touches. I think the backgrounds have some actual artistic thought put into it, and they look generic, but nice. Mind you, it’s not beautiful, but I can tell someone cared about drawing the medieval town.

The coloring, however, is inconsistent, with the show starting off with a moody dramatic palette, shifting to neutral brighter colors by the end of the cold open. And then the puke-yellow filter hits, like this show was made back in 2004 or something. Some of the coloring choices make sense and set the mood, but the washed out colors are just unpleasant.

So, is this a show you should watch? I mean, do you want to fuck your siblings? Because this is a show for someone who desperately wants to bone their older sister. Is there anything else to really mine from it? No. Not really. Look, I’d even go as far to say, you should watch Do You Love Your Mom if you really want to scratch that incestuous isekai itch. That show at least had comedic timing.