interregnum

If you're a 13-year-old who wants a watered-down do-over on Oreimo, search no further! This is everything you're looking for. 

If you're not...get ready for one of the guiltiest pleasures in recent anime memory. Or, maybe discomfiting pleasures. Or just a gross, miserable slog. Depending.

Because Eromanga Sensei is a ridiculous, uncomfortable, hilarious, unabashedly shameful series built on a parade of squirm-inducing fanservice lolis, painted with a harem formed under circumstances so strange and irrelevant that even the characters seem to believe they're doing it out of obligation to anime conventions rather than growing emotional connections, and furnished with a plot that seems less concerned with exploring itself than with straying into...not filler, exactly, but subplots so far below the plot they may as well be.

And yet...it's actually pretty good. 

There is a worthwhile story, here, ludicrous or uncomfortable though it may be: orphaned step-siblings who so desperately want a sense of family that it is either mixed up with or confused for romantic yearnings for each other--and whose unwitting pre-existing relationship (author/illustrator) helps them attempt exactly that. And if you can muster the intellectual fortitude to pull off the mental gymnastics it takes to not feel disgusting for consuming all the carefully-chosen pubescent butt shots...this show is a plain old lot of fun. 

Because despite the uncomfortable fanservice, despite the increasingly aimless "story," despite the entirely obfuscated crux of the series...it makes you laugh.

At the show. With the show. In spite of the show.

Everything's just so silly, so frivolous, so utterly bereft of pretense. Yes, it often feels like a supercut of the bath scenes from the Monogatari series, but damned if the girls aren't endearingly ridiculous. Even at the distressing rate at which the show overtly fetishizes every one of their limbs, their personalities are what keep you coming back, each so ceaselessly and carefully unbelievable in their individual absurdities that they will all but force you to crack a smile.

Or hate yourself. Or vomit. (It really does depend.)

But give it a shot, if you think you can take it. You might be surprised.

Just make sure the door is closed when you do.