○ Beautiful flowers!
○ Musically talented and proper young women!
○ Lady Prince archetypes!
○ Creepy dolls?
○ Riyoko Ikeda's fabulous OG shoujo style!
○ Sexually ambiguous and lesbian overtones!
○ While my reasons for wanting to indulge seem terribly vapid, these are things that I have really enjoyed in the past. An example in anime is Maria-sama ga Miteru: a very simplistic, platonic, and elegant TV series about ordinary girls coming to terms with their blossoming sexual preferences and just generally being an adolescent.
○ Before I digress too much into insipid hatefulness, let me clarify the main hinderance to my enjoyment of Dear Brother was that I didn't really understand where the story wanted to go, and once I thought I knew, it was derailed from what it had spend thirty episodes preparing for.
○ The story is full of nightmare fuel (I felt seriously horrified during a few moments) and most of the characters should be checked into an insane asylum, (seriouslyーbitches are fucked up and crazy) all the while focusing on the prestige of the academy and the sorority's notoriety. So, I thought, 'Sure, this anime makes sense! It's deconstructing the usually beautiful, wealthy all-girl school fantasy. Now, all of these potentially pick ax-wielding psychopaths have a purpose! This anime might be the best shoujo deconstruction I've ever seen!'
○ After Episode 32: the build-up, drama, and horror is all diminished with a random tragedy that is reminiscent of an after school special, but there is absolutely no foreshadowing or build-up to it. THE TWIST CAME COMPLETELY OUT OF LEFT FIELD! Like, all of the anime fans who were complaining about Re:Zero's asspull tragedy, this is exactly the same!
○ In my opinion, if any of the sorority’s horrifying antics and murder attempts had actually lead to the climaxーit would have been fine, but it didn’t go that route at all.
○ I haven't read the manga, so I don't know if it has the same ending as the anime, but the ending seemed retconned to Hell and back. The anime came out in 1991, the same year as the infamous Midori: Shoujo Tsubaki, and THAT got banned in Japan and the creator was denied a production team, so I'm guessing that the same could have happened with Oniisama e… but this is pure speculation about things I don't know. It's like they told the script writer, "Um, this is getting a little too dark and controversial. Let's make it have a Dead Poet’s Society ending where all of the characters are suddenly straight!"
○ Another problem that I had is that the main character (Nanako) is so wide-eyed and bushy tailed that you would think that the second or third time someone tried to kill or rape her, she would have had some sort of trauma. Or at least had a different demeanor, but she keeps the unrealistic stance of a typical mahou shoujo protagonist, and is like, "Hey! Person A (name is withheld for the sake of spoilers) tried to drown me at their family's estate! I'm going to continue to talk to them because I see the absolute best in everyone behest my own life!" Or something stupidly forgiving. Really! She should have been filing a restraining order and transferring to a different school. The random death of one of her friends is the only thing that phases her, and even then she's overshadowed by an off-screen character screaming and crying at their funeral and seems to get over it rather quickly. I get that she's a sheltered, upper-middle class girl, but this is beyond unrealistic! Annotation: See Miaka Yuuki from Fushigi Yugi to learn how "realistic" shoujo heroines can be (I had to add a bit of sarcasm to this completely serious and professional review).
○ While the anime addresses a few real topics, such as: drug abuse, bullying, incest, divorce/affairs, and suicide (actually quite a lot). It doesn't save itself from the car crash of an ending that burrows into you like a disgusting pill bug. An ending that undermines the entire point of ever watching the damned anime to begin with! I mean, why were all of these romantic ties sewn, why all of the development? I'm going to leave off there and let you watch the show if you ACTUALLY insist on knowing after all of my regurgitated hatred, but I can’t even begin to fully voice my discontent at the unresolved relations and story arcs.
○ I think that the visual style is really the only reason for watching; I thought the surrealism in conveying certain scenes was very visually appealing. The animation is choppy, and there are action scenes that have the same frame repeated three or four times to compensate for the production team not being able to animate something due to the lack of budget or time, but because of the stop-motion style animation, all of the stills look gorgeous and none of them suffer from a deformed face, a qualm that many have with modern shows.
○ Overall, Oniisama e… is about mentally unstable lesbians (who really aren't lesbians, I guessーwith the exception of Rei), pointless melodrama, and a plot that could have gone somewhere but leaves you high, dry, and bereft of any long-lasting modicum of something called meaning. This is not a good series, I feel like I wasted time watching thirty-nine episodes of a gross exaggeration of female issues and adolescence, just to be left by the roadside with nothing. My rating: 4/10.
