TenPuru – Episode 1

Content Warning: frequent fanservice, nonconsensual groping

What’s it about? Ever since his scumbag father left home to bang as many women as possible, Akagami Akemitsu has suffered in the wake of his reputation. Attempting to course correct hard, he’s cut himself off from women altogether, even trying to become a monk. There are two problems: the temple was converted into a nunnery years ago, and his scumbag father once left the place in a massive amount of debt that Akemitsu now has to work off.

Y’all, I think this season might’ve broken me. Even as I was watching every female member of the cast (bar the middle schooler, thank fuck) get introduced assets first, I found myself thinking I’d rather watch another episode of this than some of the more dire premieres this season.. At least TenPuru’s bee-stung boobies and grapefruit-in-a-sock ass cheeks haven’t made me literally nauseated, nor are they pretending to be anything loftier or wide-reaching than blatant masturbation bait. In the battle of philosophies over horny design decisions, I will always respect Yoko Taro infinitely more than Kojima Hideo.

Please do not mistake that for an assertion that TenPuru is good. Its cavalcade of buts is not limited to the jiggling jump scares that kept serving as scene transitions. It looks bright and colorful and pretty smooth under the guiding hand of director Kazuomi Koga, but than I’m pretty sure that people’s problems with Rent-a-Girlfriend did not stem from whether the show looked good. There animation is energetic and purposeful, with a few little gags (like an outside shot of an apartment building bouncing as Akemitsu stomps angrily up the stairs) that genuinely made me smile; but its relationship with physiology has a strangely inverse relationship to the amount of bodies on display. They make an explicit point of the fact that Akemitsu is totally uninterested in the one underage girl living at the temple, but I’ve seen enough anime to be firmly at “I’m fucking watching you, animators.” The writing seems to think it’s playing old harem tropes with a wink by having Akemitsu punch himself for his horny thoughts, but the episode’s climax is essentially one long Scooby-Doo chase that’s ultimately an excuse for a lot of nonconsensual groping.

And that’s what it so often seems to come back to. Yamamoto Sayo, one of the best out there at conveying authentic sensuality in her work, once described typical fanservice as being “childish and simplistic… [and] molded from pre-existing molds.”  Fanservice anime so often seems to operate in the pursuit of denying women any actual interest in sex, barring the token (often older) sexpot character. The allure is in getting contact or an eyeful against the subject’s will, and I don’t know if you wanna chalk that up to a “thrill of the hunt” or the idea that women with sexual agency are inherently degraded, but the more you see it the more exhausting it is to watch.

At the end of the day, there’s just better stuff out there. If you want earnest eroticism, there’s Yamamoto’s work (who, before becoming a widely known name with Yuri!!! On Ice directed some shows about extremely sexy and sensuous women). If you want surprisingly sweet sex comedies that center the girl’s experience, there’s O Maidens in Your Savage Season and Yamada’s First Time. If you want braindead goofery that’s 40% areola by volume but doesn’t delight in humiliating its female cast, there’s the unexpectedly queer Kandagawa Jet Girls. Hell, even grandaddy ecchi Golden Boy is more worth the watch. It too is horny for adult women, and it won’t be instantly forgotten come October.