The Shiunji Family Children – Episode 1

Content Warning: nudity, fan service, incest

What’s it about? The seven siblings of the wealthy Shiunji family are known as wunderkind and paragons of achievement in their town; but on the youngest sibling’s 15^th birthday, their father drops a bomb on them: they’re all adopted. This news hits especially hard for Arata, the family heir, who already has a fraught relationship with his sisters.

I have become, through a confluence of nearly a decade as an anime critic and a scholar of gothic fiction, rather familiar with the subtypes of incest fiction over the years. Broadly speaking you can fork down two paths, depending on whether actual blood ties are involved. If they are, you get your gothic “this is a symptom of poisonous obsession and codependency, and probably larger systemic issues” sort; the high melodrama “we fell in love and then discovered we had blood ties, leading to tragedy or at least a lot of angst” variety (which may or may not cross over into the “that’s not what ‘love is love’ means, please stop talking” subvariety); plus the more straight-up porn scenarios.

Down the other path, you have the “it’s not technically” incest, which is where the majority of siscon series like this tend to tread. Stepsiblings go here, so you have the intimacy of cohabitation and social linkage but without the deeper stigma, and you sidestep the Westermarck Effect. Then there’s the “not blood-related revelation” shows that trade on the intimacy of a shared sibling bond but don’t want to deal with the lingering ghost of Habsburg babies, aka the incest kink equivalent of “she’s actually 5000 years old.”

Why put on my pseudo-lecturer hat? Because bless its heart, The Shiunji Family Children really wants me to take it seriously. Following the “not blood-related” bombshell at the birthday dinner (cool dad, kids!), the siblings have a fairly serious group meeting about what this means for their future and reconfirm how they feel about each other. They seem troubled about the stability of their family and what this means about their own pasts as adopted children, with a gravitas more or less appropriate to at least a mid-tier melodrama. The strange, stark set dressing of the dinner scene and its formal dress create an undercurrent of Rich People Alienation that underscores the weird and isolated bubble they already live in as highly visible members of the community. And there’s lingering hushed-tones references to the fact that the youngest daughter, Kotono, apparently tried to confess to Arata way before the “not blood-related” news came out. In those moments it at least feels like it’s shooting for…maybe not Koi Kaze, but the more serious parts of Marmalade Boy.

But then there’s the other half of the episode, an interminably long series of conversations where we introduce the sisters by the marketable assets and then tag on an offhand line about “not that that matters to us as their brothers.” The eldest bounces her boobs directly into Arata’s face, he looks down his (supposed but not really) fraternal twin’s shirt, and we have some slapstick about punishing the boys for being horny after we’ve gleefully engaged in it. This meant any ability I might’ve had to respect the show for trying to be a Serious Drama About Incest had evaporated long before it tried to pull the earnestness card.

I’ve yelled before (and will again, whenever our Nisemonogatari cast comes out) about how shounen and seinen shows particularly love using the figure of the little sister as an adoring, impressionable younger girl who you don’t have to do any work to know better, who’s indebted to you as a teacher/mentor sometimes to the point of having her world totally shaped by you, and is already positioned as a domestic helpmeet, all without the guy having to put out any effort. I find it uniquely insidious, if I’m honest, and it’s guaranteed to put me off just about any show that rests on it. But even if I wanted to respect this show for trying a more thoughtful exploration of the premise, it’s already shown that it’s happy to undercut itself by playing into the same tropes as more unambiguous masturbation fodder. Life is damned short, and I’m not wasting mine on a 1/7 gamble that this series turns out to have something worthwhile to say.