Higepiyo 03: Why I’m dropping this and why I’m so damn biased towards 5 minute shorts

Posted: April 20, 2009 | Author: flomu | Filed under: Uncategorized |6 Comments »

Before I get into the actual post on Higepiyo 03, here’s some announcements:

• If you’ve not noticed, I’ve cut off the FAIL-O-METER simply because I ran out of motivation to continue it.  The standards were not consistent… and I got bored of it, so yeah.
• I’m still sick, but I’m considerably less sick now that I’ve slept a lot and drank a lot of water and went to the hospital to get some medication and stuff.
• I’m wayyyy behind on anime (sickness correlates to “does not want to look at computer screen”), so there will be either a lot less posts this week or posts about last week’s anime episodes.

Basically, Haruhi-chan is the culprit.  After watching Haruhi-chan, I’ve begun to set up other short anime against it.

Although I hated Hetalia from the start, seeing Haruhi-chan in action made me hate that anime even more, so I dropped it.
Charady’s Daily Joke was shitty compared to Haruhi-chan, so I dropped it.
Marie & Gali was just downright bad.  I dropped it.

And thus Higepiyo is in the ring against Haruhi-chan.

Episodes 1 and 2 were good.  They were really good.

And then Higepiyo talked.  Oh Jesus.

All of the humor in the first episode came from the fact that Higepiyo was a beer-drinking beard-toting chick five times bigger than any other chick who did human things with no expression on his face.

When Higepiyo talked, I knew that my prediction had come true…

Higepiyo looks like one great idea for a short series, but to have it maintain the same level of “lol here is a chick with a beard reading the newspaper” humor for 43 episodes will be tough, if not impossible.

[NOTE: It’s actually 39 episodes…]

I was wondering how the humor would hold up.  I knew that it was impossible for Cinema Citrus to keep up the contrast between Higepiyo’s constant near-emotionless expression and the exaggerated expressions of the other characters (Piroshi and his parents, etc.).

Episode 2 presented us with some pretty good humor.  Although the humor went off from what I’d expected in the first episode, it was nevertheless hilarious (especially that last guy in the three-person gang).

And now episode 3…

Did I ask to see Higepiyo blushing?  NO.

Do I want to see Higepiyo blushing?  HELL NO.

It’s disgusting.  We get to know Higepiyo as the chick whose facial expression never changes and remains in stark contrast to the exaggerated reactions of the people around him… and now what is this shit?!

Bad joke is bad.

This just felt annoying and cliched (I know that I’ve yet to see another version of this joke, but I still got this feeling).

There’s random done right (Zetsubou Sensei, for example), and then there’s random done wrong.  This is the latter.

I don’t care how random this may be, but seeing Higepiyo in a ninja outfit ain’t going to get any laughs out of me.
It’s not funny.  It’s just random.  Random is not always funny.

Granted, there were some good scenes (Higepiyo looking at others’ onigiri, snot-man makes a reappearance, etc.), but the overall impression that this episode gave me was one of failure.  I don’t want to see another episode.

Compared to Haruhi-chan and Nyoro~n Churuya-san, this show sucks.

Dropped.

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