The HOTTEST TRASH Anime of Winter 2021

there are so many great new and returning anime out right now that it's hard to know where to even start but today we're not starting with any of them because in addition to instant classics like wonder egg priority and hori mia this winter contains an abundance of slap together barrel scraping unintentionally and intentionally hilarious garbage and i'm a man with a passion for trashion some of the shows i'm about to show you are straight up awful others are just plain weird all of them on some level distinct from actually good anime are entertaining in ways best enjoyed alongside a crowd of pointing laughing possibly intoxicated friends of course getting friends together is a big ask nowadays on account of you know so i'm here in your buddy's stead to highlight the hilarity hidden in these hopeless excuses for anime as well as rate them on a proprietary scale of garbage quantity and hotness so you know how to prioritize your future [ __ ] watching and i'm starting with the one that should be at the very top of your list you don't see anime of x arms caliber every season or even every year this isn't just any old trash it's rarefied finely aged garbage of exquisitely greasy texture with a distinct picant after odor this is the kind of violent mess that you just can't look away from angles so tangled they verge on non-euclidean it lingers in your mind's eye even after you've pulled your meat ones away taunting you to imagine how any human being could [ __ ] anything up in this many ways this badly at the same time jibi8 was clearly a product of poor planning and screenwriting compounded by severely mismanaged resources hand shakers nauseating visuals resulted from an ambitious team of veteran animators using technology they hadn't totally figured out yet in service of a vision that they also seemed to be figuring out as they went along look at weed or scarred and yeah they're still not good but they don't physically hurt your brain anymore you can see what they're going for stylistically speaking ex-arms issues start with the fact that it's not really going for anything or if it is nobody working on it has even one percent of the talent required to realize it it bears all the hallmarks of both of these problems only replace that team of ambitious veteran artists with visual flight a cg studio whose previous commercial works include some environments from secchiro some unspecified game design work on other from soft titles and four of their employees did something or other on fairy fencer f you may have noticed that none of that has anything to do with making anime and as you'll see that's something of a running theme with this show's production team they were led by a film director who's never worked in animation before a screenwriter who's never worked in animation before a stunt coordinator who's never worked in animation before you get the idea basically this is what happens when a bunch of film and game guys walk into the anime industry and say we can do better if that sounds like an unfair characterization bear in mind that it's how this anime characterized itself with the tagline in its first trailer declaring war against all of the sci-fi series around the world exclamation mark exclamation mark that is already a ridiculously bold statement to be making while adapting a low rent ghost in the shell knockoff whose chief selling point as a manga judging from its covers is how naked this one android gets but when your entire team has basically never done this before i don't know maybe aim a little lower declare war on mars of destruction or battlefield earth first and work your way up from there x-arm would still be fighting an uphill battle then but not all the way up the entire himalayas in one go honestly i don't know if it actually deserves to be raided under the likes of mars of destruction or abunai sisters on mal even if its attitude does make it very hard to defend the story it's based on about a teen boy from the 2010s who gets in a car accident and wakes up in 2030 as a brain in the box with the power to hack any computer that the cops then use to solve crimes is built on some interesting ideas and has a decent cast of characters that aren't completely butchered all the time there are parts of this show that are unironically enjoyable if you can ignore the rest of it which i just can't say for something like say jibi8 that said the ironic enjoyability of the parts that aren't good which is most of them is exponential higher than most other trash anime you've seen 7 out of 10 stories with 1 out of 10 presentation before but you've never seen anything quite this one out of 10. you know an anime is special when the frame rate stutters making cgi anime look good is complicated and challenging it's taken decades of trial and error refinement of process lessons learned compounded upon lessons learned for the industry to reach the level of b stars dorohedoro drifting dragons [ __ ] even berserk 2016. to watch x-arm is to see all of that progress completely erased by a team starting from behind square zero that doesn't even know how to make regular anime this show makes mistakes that haven't been made in commercial animation since initial d season 1. its cars actually look worse somehow almost nothing about how these characters are modeled textured rigged animated or composited into scenes is optimized for the demands of tv animation or even correct on a basic technical level it's kind of impressive honestly visual flight does have a talented team of 3d modelers sekiro proves that but this show's about as far from sekiro as you can get stylistically speaking and what it's going for is clearly not most of this team's forte also it's worth noting that modeling rigging and animation are all very different disciplines with very little overlap in required skills all of which you need to make an anime it sure does seem like whoever put the bones in these 3d models just used a basic quick rig tool on default settings and left it at that their jaws move up and down along a single axis that's it their lips have no controls and are stuck in a permanent half smile and their eyes can't do much but blink and stare straight forward into a yawning abyss visible only to them so if you were hoping to see any emotions attached to this show's dialogue or drama you're [ __ ] out of luck the star-studded cast of voice actors does what it can to make up for that but there's only so much that can be done conveying pretty much anything besides walking t-pose breathing and basic hand gestures seems to be out of scope in almost all of ex-arm's scenes the one exception is its action which employs full motion capture in theory these scenes should be fairly impressive as they play to yoshikatsu kimura and takahiro ochi's strengths in live-action stunt work and indeed the raw choreography of the show's fights isn't bad the camera work also presents it coherently even if it is a little basic unfortunately it appears that nobody informed them raw motion capture data still needs to be tweaked and refined by professional animators to iron out any errors in the capture fine-tune facial movements and ensure hair and clothes react with believable weight to the captured motion if you don't want the whole end product to look like [ __ ] or that onion skinning random animation frames doesn't magically make them look cooler or make up for the lack of this process unless you've got a thing for poorly built puppets the etchy elements of this series aren't about to offset any of this this is the sort of story where the trigger that allows the protag to enter battle mode is two chicks making out with each other because ass kicking android alma needs dna from her human cop partner minami to authorize akira overriding her controls you see but uh animating kisses is pretty hard actually so the animators just clipped their mouths into each other and hid it behind a big glowing particle effect attempts to be sexy do represent a not insubstantial portion of this series narrative and none of them work but at least most of them are that awkwardly executed and end up being hilarious instead of creepy when they're not they just serve to highlight how much fan service writing like this tends to bog down stories and how little it really adds without competently horny artwork to back it up the shoddy production values end up providing the same kind of litmus test for every aspect of the manga's writing and most of them don't fare well under it none of the world building really holds up the scrutiny x-arms are supposed to be these out-of-place pieces of hyper-advanced technology that humans can't replicate but the setting includes sentient ai supercomputers and autonomous lifelike androids so the line between them and regular science stuff is almost non-existent the series also tries to present a messy gitzesque political landscape but the power dynamics don't really make sense if you think about them too long and it throws around big ideas like the military industrial complexes little more than cheap buzzwords all of this is easy enough to ignore when you're looking at cool sci-fi illustrations full of tiny meticulous technical details but with only images like this to distract you the inconsistencies and lazy writing shortcuts scream in your brain as i said a few of the questions x-arm raises and conflicts it puts its characters through are genuinely compelling enough to provoke some interesting thoughts even coded as they are in the raw sewage of the rest of it akira's whole brain in a box situation raises some interesting points about personhood for instance and while it is very funny to see minami react with the exact same expression she uses for bad echi gags to almost shooting her long lost brother turned cyborg terrorist in the face the way their differing viewpoints are rooted in their varying proximity to their parents deaths is still inherently fascinating the dumb stuff does tend to distract one from these notions pretty fast though like in that same scene alma has been reprogrammed to help with little bro's revenge thing and severed her quantum neural link with akira to stop him from interfering the show isn't subtle about that link being a metaphor for hanky panky so did akira just get cyber ntr'd if only he'd known about today's sponsor expressvpn he could have actually their text not super applicable to this specific sci-fi hacking scenario i just needed a segue into this ad spot luckily expressvpn is applicable to the everyday lives of anime appreciators and nerds in general the world over like the nerds at techradar the verge and cnet who all named it the best vpn on the web if you're not yet familiar with the whole vpn or virtual private network concept expressvpn allows you with one click of a button to re-route all web traffic to and from your computer through one of their secure high-speed servers in 94 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the dooblydoo today i have so much left to say about x arm it's every frame is a fractal collage of how not to make anime bullet points that only gets funnier the more technical knowledge you possess about how 3d animation is supposed to work and look though many of the mistakes will still be obvious to even the untrainedest of eyes like how putting ps2 grade cgi people in the same shot as talking head visual novel portraits of characters you didn't have time to model only highlights how poorly the former emulate hand-drawn animation and how stiff and limited the latter are in their movement this is a show where a villain hangs his own mug shot up as a 20-foot tall portrait in the foyer of his mansion simply because that's how few unique drawings per episode there were to go around that's not even getting into how the 2d characters stick out like those rocks in a dragon ball background telling you exactly who's going to be around for more than a couple episodes and or get involved in fight scenes this alone spoils a ton of the story i feel like i haven't even covered the basics of all this badness but there's more trash left to get to and i guess i've gotta save something for the end of year roast for now i'm content to declare that x-arm is a full-on 5-alarm dumpster fire the highest honor available in a rating system that i definitely thought about before writing this sentence launching this system with a perfect score is kind of bad form though it doesn't mean much without a range of lower scores with which to compare it so before i get into more of winter's hottest garbage let me briefly touch on some trashy shows that ultimately left me cold early on in the season i thought that hortensia saga would make for excellent roasting fodder but after a chaotic first episode featuring a goofy grim dark werewolf encounter it settles into the same boring old routine as almost every other generic fantasy anime based on a moderately successful mobile game so i rated one kitchen trash can full of stale bread and hair i had even higher lower expectations for project scarred the latest potential disaster piece from handshakers studio gohans as i alluded to in the x-arm section though they've mostly figured out how to make their weird art style work at this point as well as it can work and the story they're telling is just a generic dystopian action deal where some of the characters have superpowers with martial arts gun play that's competent but unremarkable two trash cans full of stale bread and hair skate leading stars is a bad yuri on ice clone that invents a new form of ai judged synchronized team skating in order to differentiate itself from its inspiration and also avoid having to do any research into how the real sport works or is scored all told it's a pretty bog standard team sports drama thing saved for the fact that all of its characters are weirdly mean and irritable which is sort of funny sometimes but mostly just makes the series conflicts feel forced and overplayed also the show's grown inducing attempts at humor often put a damper on its ability to get ironic laughs i give it one sizeable waste paper bin near a poorly wired light fixture but with a sprinkler nearby that stops it from getting too interesting we cross diva alive is a convoluted trading card game anime spun off from the equally convoluted but much better madoka magicka meets yu-gi-oh setting of selector infected we cross in which teams of three virtual idols compete in card game showdowns that are also dance-offs to win both audience approval and more conventional card game points both of which count toward a greater ranking system it's not very well explained there's a lot of comic potential in that weird premise and the character designs range from absurdly horny to hornily absurd but the story so far is just predictably dull friendship and optimism-driven idol stuff from what i've seen i'm gonna give it two convention hall bins full of booster pack filler and discount idol doujins directly under an air conditioner that's how not hot this trash is but should the series pull some sort of on brand dark twist maybe we can flick a cigarette butt in there and see what happens if you're looking to laugh at a mishandled moae show lbx girls will give you way better bang for your buck it also starts off in a yugioh-esque world where everyone is obsessed with the same toy in this case pocket-sized battle capable model robots called lbx short for little battler's experience our protagonist yui is the only person on the entire planet who has not yet caught the highly merchandiseable fever as the series begins though she finally cracks under the peer pressure buys a toy robot and gets instantly esocied into a parallel post-apocalyptic tokyo besieged by giant robot spiders therein she discovers that she's become an armor girl able to wield giant versions of the tiny lbx weaponry against the mimesis threat and joins a squad of other armor girls as she searches for a way home it's a wildly convoluted setup for what amounts to a basic battle road trip series with a cast of generic waifus for the most part the plot is rote and predictable moe nonsense but perhaps because of the baseline absurdity baked into its premise mundane scenes and conversations often swerve into amusingly surreal territory like when a guy who's yelling at his dad for getting his girlfriend killed can't decide if he wants to take a cupcake with him when he storms out of the room also the later flashback to said girlfriend's dramatic tragic death is a laugh riot and even when the show drags its feet through exposition and dialogue which is most of the time the fact that none of its characters really think or act like rational human beings infuses its slow moments with gently ironic humor i give lvx girls three big back alley bins full of gunpla boxes and gasoline i haven't seen it go up yet but if it does it could be spectacular by now you should have a firm grasp on how this rating system works so i will never attempt to explain it again and if you ask me i will yell at you on that note in discussing the brashest trash of winter 2021 one series is unavoidable not because it's particularly remarkable but because if i don't say anything about it a few very loud and insistent commenters will a lot so big fat content warning if sexual assault is a thing you don't want to hear about today i won't get advertiser unfriendly or dwell on this for too long but use the chapters if you want to skip over it redo of a healer follows kiaru the healing mage in a generic demon king battling rpg party whose fellow big air quotes heroes keep him hooked on drugs so they can use and abuse him both for his incredible but traumatic to use recovery powers and i mean you heard the content warning kiaru discovers that his powers can be used to heal the world granting him a temporal do-over at the moment of the demon king's defeat with which he plans to take meticulous machiavellian time revenge on his abusers by letting them do it all to him again for six straight months but after that he pulls the reverse uno card on the evil princess erases her memory and changes both of their faces so they can go defeat the demon king on their own in secret and run through the rest of his revenge list while they're at it it takes the kingdom like a week to track him down light yagami this anti-hero is not it's a plot full of excuses cliches and holes you could drive truck kun through centered on comically vile paper-thin personalities and built atop a laughably contrived fantasy world foundation like this healing magic can regrow limbs transform people's faces steal their memories in dxp and reverse time but actually healing someone who passed out two seconds ago that's impossible guy that one scene makes the near-missing tiny web fingers of amazing spider-man 2 feel dramatic and weighty by comparison but i don't know if it's all that meaningful a comparison sure redo of healer fails spectacularly at telling a compelling or even sensical story but it's not really trying to do that so much as it is constructing a series of quick vaguely plausible causal links between set uh staring at a wall and listening to music scenes this isn't anime it's hentai just hentai with tv level production values that happens to be using a late night broadcast slot to advertise its blu-rays i don't think there's much point in seriously criticizing a series like this for storytelling or subject matter i doubt most people watching it are taking it very seriously anyone who is likely won't be receptive to criticism and it's not like it's trying to make a serious statement with or about its questionable content it's just there for people who are into that sort of thing and off television there is way more shocking stuff catering to those same tastes if they're your tastes that's between you and haruhi but if you're looking for a good [ __ ] watch or endurance anime you can do a lot better or worse i guess to be fair though it is a topic of the now and you can also do worse or uh better there's definitely some solid unintentional comedy to be found here like when kiaru takes flair into hiding and changes their names to kyaruga and freya and over here is mr hilter good afternoon also one of his healer powers what's a youtube safe way of putting this it uh turns his icing sugar into rare candy the jokes practically write themselves there i've heard of grinding before but this is ridiculous fill in the blank like it's worth the xp hey baby i've got your rest bonus right here depending on your outlook the way the story bends over backwards phrasing in order to morally justify its protagonist is pretty funny too like every villain needs to be even more cartoonishly evil than a slave-owning serial predator so if sugo from sao is a 9 they all start at 11 and just keep getting louder from there that said all the bad guys are bad in pretty much the same way just more they don't get much screen time either and the remaining plot that isn't you know plot is padded out with a lot of slow basic fantasy questing stuff you've seen a thousand times before for a show that tries so damn hard to be spicy it ends up being pretty bland most of the time considering all that i'm giving redo of a healer a rating of two soggy smoldering trash cans and one waste basket full of moldy tissues there's definitely some dumb fun to be had here for those who can stomach the subject matter but that's about it perhaps it would have fared better in my estimation had this winter not blessed us with an infinitely more ridiculous and creatively contrived fantasy harem anime the hidden dungeon only i can enter is an adventure story set in a dragon quest esque world where everyone is born with innate skills noir stardia's skill great sage allows him to instantly know literally it all by asking questions of an omniscient wizard who lives in his head sadly he's never been able to take full advantage of this because that knowledge comes at a terrible cost agonizing brutal headaches that can only be cured by making out with a hot girl like his childhood friend emma who is constantly vocally aching for it but not his sister alice who is constantly vocally aching for it smart man follows the rules after a rich bully steals his dream of being a librarian noir's only fallback is to become an adventurer so he uses great sage to uncover a hidden dungeon in which he can grind for loot and train against rare monsters and once he gets there is led by psychic whispers to a beautiful buxom blue-haired woman chained asleep to the walls via telepathy she introduces herself as olivia servant a famous world-class adventurer who was sealed by the chains of death after defeating a demon here 200 years ago those chains will kill her if removed so she decides to make noir her apprentice while he figures out how to get her out of there and pass her unique skills onto him one of these skills bestow allows its user to pass skills onto other people another editor allows its user to edit the conditions of any other skill the last one get creative allows its user to create any skill they can imagine instantly at the cost of their life force as measured in lp which is a pretty hefty toll but there are ways of recovering life points noir just has to do things that give him life like eating a hearty meal finding gold or treasure to satisfy his earthly desires or touching some boobies i don't have to tell you which of those comes up most often so to recap this protag kun has the power to know literally anything and do literally anything with the drawback that these abilities will hurt or kill him if he's not constantly experiencing etching scenes you may not think that's a drawback but just imagine asking your adventuring companion to suck on her ear while a monster is trying to eat both of you and you'll begin to understand what a fearless hero google stadia really is it doesn't take long before girls are fighting over him as soon as he turns his first quest in and proves his stuff adventurer's guild receptionist lola decides she wants to have a very close working relationship with him which bugs emma but not that much she's not saying get your hands off my mans just hey leave some room for my hands and that's a good attitude to have because every other woman they meet also wants to jump noir's bones which totally makes sense sure he's so dense that he can make out with a girl every single morning before school and still be convinced she only thinks of him as a friend but uh look he's protag don't question it that seems to be the driving logic of this entire show actually and it tends to be pretty tongue-in-cheek about it noir's imoto has magic aho gay that automatically detect when a new harem salute has entered his orbit for example and at one point he picks up a lucky accident skill that dramatically raises his odds of fumbling his way face or hands first into more life points then realizing its immense terrifying power he immediately edits it so it won't interrupt any important story scenes or like ruin a funeral or something spoofing harem tropes is nothing new in anime of course and none of these jokes are particularly clever the real comic gold in this dungeon lies in its efforts to set up fan service moments because despite having built-in excuses like that lucky accident skill and those magic headaches whose only cure is a heaping dose of tongue the hidden dungeon only i can enter is never content to rest on its laurels or rely on cliches and it gets real wacky with this stuff in one scene a combat instructor rewards noir for his excellent dodging by sitting on his chest and then punishes him for complaining about it by sitting on his face face sitting by the way is also a skill in this world lola's rival receptionist sarah is an a-rank face sitter gotta watch out for those min maxers in another scene to earn the money and life points they need to cure a death curse that noir just happened to notice that one of his classmates was under by randomly scanning her he emma lola and an elf priestess named luna who i can't stress this enough just met them like two days ago take part in a harem dog show run by a very divorced nobleman and his cult of incel shy guys with the girls performing tricks like warming your master up when he's cold and planting three kisses on his lips simultaneously which seems physically impossible it's like a dnd mad lib filled in by a 12 year old boy who just found out what sex is last week from an anime and isn't entirely clear on the mechanics yet but nonetheless thinks the whole thing is pretty nifty and while this show is substantially hornier in its scripting than even high school dxd its production values are on average so low that it's rarely genuinely sexy and even when it is it never aims above a pg rating so with a few exceptions this is the sort of hilariously trashy etchy that anyone can laugh at without feeling too uncomfortable fun for the whole family when they inevitably walk in on you watching it the series has some fast and loose fun with its fantasy elements as well goofy weird monster designs and silly skill and stat related jokes abound it's cast is also generally fun to be around even if they are a little flat in their characterization it's not as strong a fantasy comedy as konosuba or even suppose a kid from the last dungeon boonies moved to a starter town but it is funny on purpose and the intentional comedy helps to smooth out the weight between the most outrageous moments of contrived fan service by the way don't miss the after credit scenes in every episode from three onward they're really something i'm giving the hidden dungeon only i can enter four steadily blazing oil drums for its uproarious unintentional comedy and surprisingly cozy overall atmosphere for the greedy trash connoisseur not quite satisfied with x-arm it's definitely the season's next best worst thing that's all i have time to cover for now but wait wait stop the presses future jeff here after i finished writing and recording this i saw that netflix had dropped an adaptation of the ultra-edgy survival game manga high-rise invasion and while i'm too busy with other projects at present to properly measure the temperature and quantity of garbage in it the sloppy writing sensationalized yet barely animated violence awkward pacing time to content warning of 10 minutes and whiplashing characterization all wreak of a hefty human heap of the stuff i'll be talking about it at some point for sure but if you want to watch it before then bring some beers okay now for real that's all i have time to cover but as they say one man's treasure is another man's trash so i'd love to hear what your favorite trash of winter 2021 is and why in the comments down below and if you'd like to hear about some good anime you could be watching like a freak there's a video on the end card that can help with that or you can just watch the worst anime of 2020 again i'm jeff though professional [ __ ] bag signing out from my mother's basement

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 1,178,367

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, sword art online, redo of healer, the hidden dungeon only I can enter, Ex-arm, anime roast, bad anime, trash anime, winter anime, anime 2021, LBX Girls, wixoss diva(a)live, hortensia saga, how not to make an anime, promised neverland, harem anime, funny anime, funny bad anime, crunchyroll original, ex-arm reaction, the hottest trash, hottest trash anime

Id: CtphRh3teGQ

Length: 33min 2sec (1982 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021