Don’t you just hate it when you download a raw to try to crank out a review quickly but by the time you get around to watching it and gathering your thoughts, the fansubbed version is already out?

Not to spite anyone, but those fansubbers are ridiculously fast. At any rate, this review was still done with the raw version, so forgive any incorrect names – I don’t think I can be blamed for too much, because ‘FLAME HEART’ is a very poorly conceived name.

Alright, before we start, let us reflect. What do you think this series would be about? Considering all the series in the past that have graced us with stories of butlers and maids; such thrilling series as Hayate no Gotoku or Kamen no Maid Guy. Think hard about it.

Gathering our past experiences, did you really Ladies versus Butlers would be about anything besides this?

What is this. Foreign. Sensation…

It must be some sort of fate

Ecchi. Yes, it’s tried, it’s tested. Does it work? If the viewer is thirteen, yes. Unfortunately, even I, the illegally young one, aren’t, and I feel strongly that most of my readers aren’t as well. That, and some thirteen year olds nowadays are preconscious enough not to be drawn in by bras and panties. Is that truly all the series has going for it though? Let’s see.

Kurogane Luna? Is that you?

We begin with a tiny bit of In medias res, where our protagonist sits on the floor in front of a crying girl with atypically blonde drills. A tiny bit, because we’re shown the events that lead up to this scene in the same episode, unlike the most prominent recent use of in medias res, Mazinger Z-Hen’s iconic episode 1. The focus on these two leads the viewer to think she’s the heroine (but of course).

One would think that this is one of those clichéd visual novel chapter 1’s, where the protagonist unwittingly bumps into the heroine while walking to the school he’s transferring into, knocking her down and catching a glimpse of that panchira of destiny before helping her up. Of course, he must cover his eyes immediately, look away, blush and interject ‘I didn’t see it’. The only difference here is that the girl is crying, we don’t get our obligatory pantyshot and the protagonist is looking all too uncomfortable. What happened here?

Do we really want to know?

Before we are allowed to answer the question, the ‘plot’ is thrown at us with all the speed of a… casually strolling elderly woman. We don’t see our protagonist again until halfway through the episode, and until then I can firmly tell you that nothing happens. Apparently, the school in question is one where the aristocratic go through a proper educational curriculum, and everyone else is taught to become the model butler or maid. You’d think there’d be more of a social divide, with more sarcastic butler/maid remarks at the blatantly immoral human hierarchy. Then again, that wouldn’t be innocent enough.

Our servant class is in the middle of a practical lesson that involves serving the upper class at the tea table – and that is exactly what we get, butlers and maids, going about taking orders. Light chat between the heroines. And most strikingly, the lack of background music.

I swear, the first time I heard her name I got ‘Flamehard-san’, which would be too ridiculous to write about. I hope for the love of all that it’s actually Fleimhart, or something with such a Germanic note.

Muting the background music strengthens the impact of drama. What it does is it diverts the viewer’s senses to her or his sight, causing the focus to become the events being shown on screen entirely. However, when nothing of note is happening at all and you choose to have no background music the staleness and boredom of the scene becomes the elephant in the room. Not a good idea at all.

For the longest time we hear the clatter of plates, chatter of girls and nothing more.

This is the exposition they decided to show us. What does it do? It bores us, period. Alright, we learn the twin-drills name is (I really hope not) Flameheart. The other girl that seems to get on her nerves is surnamed Saikyou. The drills gets aggravated easily, and is the type to sing of the ‘wideness of her family’s hearts’. There’s an androgynous butler the girls like by the name of Daichi.

OMYGAWD SOMETHING’S HAPPENI- Oh, no, nevermind.

They know the names of some fancy teas and pastries. Frankly, at this point the viewer doesn’t care. The point of exposition may be to set the mood, which is being played off as a peaceful environment right now. Presumably this is presented to contrast how things will be chaotic once the protagonist (named one Hino Akiharu, but he shall from here be the protagonist) makes his appearance. But you don’t need this entire scene just to tell us that. Peace could’ve been depicted in half the time –a quick shot of that lake, then another of everyone tea-timing quietly, boom, peace permeates the setting.

“Kami wa ten ni imashi…”

“Subete you wa koto mo nashi…” YES DAMN RIGHT YOU ARE THAT NOTHING’S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD

“Nanika ga kawareba ii no ni.” Hah. The characters actually say they want something to happen. I’m going to drown to death in this irony.

Over all things the first episode should be a bout to attract possible viewers. This is the pilot pre-release episode, after all. For once I would allow throwing out exposition to get to the meaty bits – even if that is unrewarding breast groping and face-sitting in this case. It’s the anime’s card to attract viewers. It’s not a good one, but by all means, play it. Yes, I am nitpicking on this tea serving scene. It’s not truly that long, seeing as how the entire episode is only twenty minutes, but it certainly feels a lot longer than what it really is. Couldn’t they have at least shown different classes taking place in the school? Maybe a joint biology class, where the butlers and maids do the experiments while the higher students tell them what to do? Did they really need to show mediocrity that badly?

The board chairman was also a breather, as she spoke in normal Japanese too.

This next one is a bit of a special problem that only applies to me, but personally I had even less motivation to plough through this first half, because nobody spoke coherently. The characters were unsurprisingly speaking very polite Japanese – very polite Japanese that I have trouble listening to. After all, it’s not every day someone talks about upholding one’s dignity.

Like a hero

Like a shining beacon our protagonist arrives to dispel the boredom, and the viewer has probably never been as glad to see a grizzled Japanese teenager. He’s definitely a breath of fresh air, because he speaks like a normal person. Almost like a final jab in the gut though, he walks past twin-drills at first without either of them saying anything.

DO SOMETHING!

Thank you.

This clash of commoner with aristocrat is as predictable as the outcome of freezing water – twin-drills is displeased by his brazen manner of speaking, and in the brashness of her character throws a (aristocratic) punch at our protagonist, who easily sidesteps it. She trips, and the ensuing entanglement of bodies causes him to land on top of her, his hand of course taking firm grasp of her breast. Thus she is now obligated to chase him around the school, as if doing so would somehow reverse the occurrence of her ever having been groped.

Obviously, the protagonist stirs up quite the uproar, causing many more misunderstandings along the way. Most of the girls who see him faint on first sight, which I admit I chuckled a little to. It’s not realistic, but notice how I’ve long moved away from realism and am now just talking about the use (or misuse) of plot devices.

Alright, here, let me introduce the contemporary anime characters of the new decade:

The tsundere blonde with twindrills,

The little girl who refers to herself in the third person and claims to be seventeen (read: loli),

The eccentric board chairman who seems very interesting as she’s completely different from normal board chairmen, is laid back and has a special quirk (playing yaoi-games),

The board chairman’s ‘straight man’, a no nonsense woman who seems taller than most characters, wears glasses and has a hime(ish) cut,

The gentle and ditzy long-haired onee-san that has no sense of shame,

The clumsy green-haired maid that propels the gags,

The yandere osananajimi with unremarkable short brown hair,

The Yaoi material.

Our protagonist is finally cornered, But Saikyou helps him out by revealing that she knew him in the past, and that he is actually a very innocent individual.

Really now.

As proof, she tells everyone his childhood dream that he recited in front of the entire class as a wee lad: “Boku no yume wa, okikunattara, kawaii oyome-san ni natte, shiawase na seikatsu okuru nan desu”- that when he grew up, he wanted to be a cute wife and lead a happy life. For once, to this series’ defense, this is a striking statement – I lost all respect for the protagonist immediately. He was the only one who made the episode highly unbearable to watch, as opposed to utterly horrible. Well, him, and the little girl.

The problem is solved, the protagonist finds out his dorm-mate is the androgynous butler (you know, so the series can fuel its yaoi-ish moments when it needs to, or maybe some grand revelation that the boy is actually female), and the episode ends.

So what is the verdict of Ladies vs. Butlers? Bad, but not in a creative way. It’s another one of those epitomes of anime normality that features every trope, every character stereotype, and doesn’t exactly succeed in presenting them in a groundbreaking fashion. But I assume that is also the point; this is a play on all these stereotypes that have been successful in the past.

We complain about unoriginality, but Akiharu basically performing cunnilingus on the clumsy maid that sits on his face keeps our eyes on the screen. I complain about poor presentation, but was titillated the right way when Akiharu groped the little girl. If a doujin of the series ever gets made and scanlated, us viewers will probably say to ourselves, ‘oh, this crappy series,’ and then hit the download button.

So, was it good? No. Did it insult the viewer’s intelligence? Quite a bit.  What it has for it though is such a wide range of moé-types that the viewer will probably find one she or he likes vehemently, and thus they are suckered into ‘giving the next episode a peek’. I seem to like rewarding anime series that stay true to themselves and offer what it said it would, and it’s the same for Ladies versus Butlers. They weren’t really promising an epic, and even in the beginning we’d already predicted that there’d be the groping and disrobing and whatnot. It’s pointless titillation, but at least the children aren’t suckling one another yet. And, to their credit, they did put a lot into the art.

Akiharu teaches us the four steps to the attack. The approach,

The tsukkomi,

The deed,

Whether all these moé-types are the ‘cancer of anime’ is a matter to be argued somewhere else. It’s more the cancer of old viewers, who have other values. After all, if it weren’t selling, we wouldn’t keep getting these series.

The escape.

Thus, I will watch episode two. In name, for Mimina, in essence, because I’m a masochist.

Ningyo

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2. Please Call Me a Bad Dog, Mitsuba-sama
3. Some Things Are Never Meant To Be Said
4. First Two: That Series That’s Making Me Gay