Everybody Was Half-Price Fighting...
I think I've found my Guilty Pleasure of this season's anime... Ben-To.
It's a shounen (aimed at adolescent boys and young men) battle-school (story set in a high-school involving organised mayhem) harem (several girls and one boy, usually a bit of a nebbish) rom-com (romantic comedy) with a trace of yuri (girl-girl hubba-hubba) and panchira (panty flash) as well as zettai ryouiki (the area of skin above thigh-high stockings and no I'm not making this up, otakus do have a specific term for this particular interest complete with graded scoring of examples).
Battle-school stories don't usually interest me too much; the storylines involve a lot of posing, high kicking (see panchira) and people with odd names like the Ice Witch and Monk getting knocked unconscious but nobody really gets hurt as in Real Life. There's regular power-upping going on and the fights don't settle anything as there will be another episode next week with another fight. The reason the fights take place, for domination of the school council or for historical reasons such as all the fighters being reincarnations of warriors from, say the Warring Kingdom period in China are usually either pointless or overwrought too.
So what's the supreme reason for fighting in this particular anime? Half-price bentos (box lunches). Shortly before the local supermarket closes the remaining bentos are marked down to half-price and all the poverty-stricken types who have been lurking in the shadows of the pot-noodle shelves make their move -- but there are more of them than there are bentos on special offer and on this battlefield only the strong survive. The weak go hungry, and our hero Satou-san is going without dinner a lot. He's also spending nights in the hospital where at least they feed him breakfast before throwing him out. Help is at hand though...
Yes, it's stupid but going by the first episode it's got something about it that makes it worth putting on my watch list. Now I feel peckish...
It's a shounen (aimed at adolescent boys and young men) battle-school (story set in a high-school involving organised mayhem) harem (several girls and one boy, usually a bit of a nebbish) rom-com (romantic comedy) with a trace of yuri (girl-girl hubba-hubba) and panchira (panty flash) as well as zettai ryouiki (the area of skin above thigh-high stockings and no I'm not making this up, otakus do have a specific term for this particular interest complete with graded scoring of examples).
Battle-school stories don't usually interest me too much; the storylines involve a lot of posing, high kicking (see panchira) and people with odd names like the Ice Witch and Monk getting knocked unconscious but nobody really gets hurt as in Real Life. There's regular power-upping going on and the fights don't settle anything as there will be another episode next week with another fight. The reason the fights take place, for domination of the school council or for historical reasons such as all the fighters being reincarnations of warriors from, say the Warring Kingdom period in China are usually either pointless or overwrought too.
So what's the supreme reason for fighting in this particular anime? Half-price bentos (box lunches). Shortly before the local supermarket closes the remaining bentos are marked down to half-price and all the poverty-stricken types who have been lurking in the shadows of the pot-noodle shelves make their move -- but there are more of them than there are bentos on special offer and on this battlefield only the strong survive. The weak go hungry, and our hero Satou-san is going without dinner a lot. He's also spending nights in the hospital where at least they feed him breakfast before throwing him out. Help is at hand though...
Yes, it's stupid but going by the first episode it's got something about it that makes it worth putting on my watch list. Now I feel peckish...