October 09, 2009

Mystery Meat -- Sumomomo Momomo

Today's Mystery Meat series is "Sumomomo momomo". It isn't quite a mystery, however; I downloaded it just a few days ago and have some idea what I'm getting. NSFW below the fold.

UPDATE: Ubu Roi responds.


Momoko is the daughter of a great martial artist, who has grown up in the mountains and fought bears bare-handed and meditated under waterfalls and so on and so forth. At the beginning we see her attempting to use the clan's greatest and most powerful technique -- and not quite managing it. It works, but she just isn't strong enough to bring out its full effect.

Her father says that as a girl she will never be strong enough, and the only thing she can do is to find a strong guy and have strong babies. She enthusiastically agrees. She's clearly a classic genki-girl so it's a foregone conclusion that she's going to be enthusiastic about just about everything.

The guy she's going to be chasing is named Inuzuka Koushi. His father is also a great master of the martial arts but he doesn't like violence. He wants to be a criminal prosecutor, and let someone else be violent towards criminals and the like.

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The main cast includes two other girls. In the OP the blonde one is shown with a katana. The dark haired one might be a ninja. The blonde guy may be gay; he isn't shown to be particularly manly. The assumption is that we're looking at a harem comedy, and the blonde guy is part of the harem.

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Koushi is a stud, despite his pacifism, or cowardice. Tall and dark and smart, and all the girls in his class seem to swoon over him. He seems to be ignoring it. But he's a bit shocked one day in class to see Momo at the window, looking at him with puppy dog eyes. Thing is, it's the fourth floor. But she's really there. She's using some mysterious ability to stick to the wall without falling.

She follows him home. He ends up almost getting hit by a guy on a bicycle who gets mad and looks like he wants a fight. Koushi starts reciting the law to him about the fines, imprisonment, and lawsuits that could follow, and the guy backs down.

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At home, Koushi reads the newspaper, paying attention to the legal news. He almost seems like he's an otaku for the law. His father comes in and they yell at each other. Koushi calls his father ahou oyaji which is less than respectful. (It means "stupid old man".)

The argument is interrupted by the doorbell. They both go, and see Momo outside. She challenges Unken, Koushi's father, to a match.

Down on the bank of the river (seems like that's a common place for this kind of thing in anime).

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Momo starts it off with a bang, her ki well and truly fired up. Unken dodges her first kick. She uses that ultimate technique we saw at the beginning and thinks she gets him with it, but is wrong. (It summons up the spirit of a dragon which is launched at the enemy.) Then he fires up his ki and uses a similar technique, only his creates a wolf. Momo is defeated, but not really harmed.

She apologizes abjectly but Unken is impressed and praises her. She introduces herself as Kuzuryuu Momoko. And then says, "I'm here to make babies with Inuzuka Koushi-dono!" Unken approves.

He tells Koushi, "When you were just born, I made a promise with a certain man." We get a flashback of Koushi's father fighting with Momo's father, and it ends with them agreeing that the two kids should be married.

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This is the first Koushi has heard of it, and isn't pleased. He yells at his father but stops when he sees what Momo is doing.

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He turns her down, and he isn't nice about it at all. "I have envisioned my wife to be dignified and elegant. Not someone like you." What a jerk.

Momo doesn't give up. She starts stalking him, pretty much. Next morning she is waiting outside the door of his house and walks with him to school. She tells him they knew each other as kids, but he doesn't remember and is trying not to.

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As the day goes on at school, things get stranger and stranger as she actively pursues him. In art class she "poses" for him in a tree outside the classroom. He quickly closes the curtain on the room so that no one else can see. He ends up feeling sick, and goes to the infirmary. She's there waiting for him. And so on.

Because Koushi does so well in school, and because he's good looking and the girls swoon over him, he has quite naturally earned the enmity of some of the guys who are not as smart and not as good looking, but much more willing to be violent. Several of them eventually take the opportunity to bully him. "Do our homework for us!" And he doesn't object. He acts like a coward.

Momo watches this, and it wasn't what she expected.

Walking home, she asks him: Why are you doing those guys' homework? He stutters and then lies to her: "You can't pass the law exam if you don't do other people's homework." She believes him.

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She sneaks into the bath to wash his back.

And ends up again trying to seduce him in his bedroom. He tosses her out and blocks the door. She wails, "Is someone like me unable to satisfy someone as strong as Koushi-dono?"

Koushi's father sets her straight. Koushi isn't strong, he's weak. "Not only his body, but also his heart. He's a coward who can do nothing but run away in front of violence."

Momo says, masaka! Unken continues, "He has been a spineless wimp ever since he gave up on martial arts." Which naturally makes me wonder just how far he advanced before he gave up, and what it was that made it happen. (I bet I know.)

On the way to school next morning she asks him why he gave up martial arts. And a memory he's been trying to suppress almost comes to him, but he still keeps it down. They see the three bullies beating up another kid, and Momo says they should help. Koushi freezes in fear and then tries to turn away. He tries to make an excuse by saying it's not important.

And Momo starts to cry. "Was it also unimportant when you saved me from bullies that time? Why are you suppressing your true self?" And he realizes that he has been.

He confronts the three bullies. And starts reciting law to them. They're not impressed and set up to beat the crap out of him. Momo shouts to him, "Do your best, Koushi-dono!" And he's heard it before, and his memories start coming back.

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He did try to save her when he was a kid.

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And he got his butt kicked. And they hung him upside down and pulled his pants off in front of her. He was mortified, thoroughly traumatized. Since then he's had a terrible phobia for quarrels, and quite frankly a gutless coward.

Back to the present, there's still the problem of the three guys. Koushi ends up trying to talk his way out of the fight, and the bullies end up saying some nasty things about Koushi and his future wife.

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Momo gets pissed. Which, it seems, was what Koushi was hoping for.

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The fight doesn't last long. The three creeps are totally outclassed. And as they're laying on the ground, he hits each of them on the head with his law book. Not really very admirable.

Some more mucking around, and it ends with Koushi's father accepting Momo to live in their house. I think. He does again approve the marriage between them.

End of episode.

It's not really great, even though I did laugh out loud several times. And there's a lot of fan service. But Momo and Koushi are both less than sympathetic, because they don't feel like real characters. Koushi could become one, if he gets his act together and stops being a coward. But Momo is just a comic prop.

And her voice grates. The seiyuu hasn't done much, and it's pretty obvious why. She's still in the industry (she's in Queen's Blade right now) but I don't think she's going to be a big name.

I don't really have a lot of interest in watching any more of it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 05:15 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 1437 words, total size 9 kb.

1 This is going to be the due to the ecchi tag, isn't it?  I can't think of any other motivation...

Posted by: ubu at October 09, 2009 05:27 PM (f8pAz)

2 No, I deliberately downloaded this one because I'd heard about it. But I hoped it would be better than it turned out to be.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 09, 2009 05:29 PM (+rSRq)

3

I was curious to see how the series ended. Also, eps 23 and 24 were stated to be DVD-only, so I was curious about them.

Ep 22 was the real ending of the series, and Momoko ended up fighting some sort of big-bad, a really huge man that someone else called "Tenga" who had strong ki. Their last fight was like something out of DBZ, with Momoko tossing around her equivalent of kamehameha and blowing up at least one mountain with it. Plus she and the big-bad were both flying.

There was a hint that Koushi has some sort of terrible power inside him, but his mother did something when he was very young to seal that power so it would never come out. But it does come out, briefly, during Momo's battle though, but he doesn't seem to use it. Momo wins on her own.

Oh, the other strange thing is that in the last episode Koushi and Momo are living in an apartment together. I still saw nothing to make me have a great urge to watch the series as a whole, however.

I was watching it with the sound turned off, but during the battle I got curious, so I started listening too. And Momo's voice still was wrong. It was a terrible casting choice.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at October 09, 2009 07:06 PM (+rSRq)

4 This is one of the shows where the entire plot is in the opening credits.  It is amusing, and worth a look, but I stopped about mid-way.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at October 09, 2009 08:33 PM (PiXy!)

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