With a name that long your first guess should be it came from Japan.
If you’re going to focus a story on the villain, please do not let the villain win. They’re the villain. The role of a villain in a story is to see them lose, to see the heroes overcome adversity and come out on top. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a villain be the protagonist, however. Perhaps it’s a redemption arc, or they’re fighting a greater evil because they don’t want the competition. Or maybe it’s a comedy and seeing the incompetent villain fail to take over the world but succeed at life in general, like tonight’s Showcase.
Miss Kuroitsu From The Monster Development Department is a 2022 Japanese animated series, based on a manga series appearing in Comet Meteor. created by Hiroaki Mizusaki. It follows the adventures of a lab assistant for the evil organization Agastya because supervillain organization names in Japan don’t always make sense, at least to an American like myself. They’re competing with all the usual organizations dealing with sentai and Kamen Rider knockoffs but right now Agastya is the last group standing. If the leader wasn’t a girly girl at heart, the head of the department wasn’t waiting to the last minute, and the lead henchmen is at least trying to be a good boss. It’s not all bad. While Touka Kuroitsu is trying to advance in the “company” she has caught the eye of the local marketplace worker…who is tied to the hero they’re trying to destroy, Divine Swordsman Blader, who may be just as incompetent as they are. He doesn’t know she works for the enemy…and she doesn’t know he’s into her.
Age-restricted? You have to go to YouTube? Yes, there’s fanservice, but this isn’t a kids website, just a PG one. The nudity is covered up with smoke, hair, and censor logos, and it’s barely part of the episode. Sorry, folks. I hate when YouTube pulls nonsense like this. Making matters worse is right now Crunchyroll has the rest of the series behind the paywall as of this writing. Still, I know some of you have an account…or other methods, so I did want to shout out this show.
I do like the effort put into the designs for the henchmen and especially Blader’s armor. There’s even a part of the closing credits with a real life Blader costume and bike, which I’m guessing we’ll see later. I also really love his suit up sequence. The humor works, though given recent events and revelations you have to wonder how much of it was…fixed for Western audiences (allegedly). That’s the problem with such things. How am I supposed to take the line about how diverse the villains are in their monsters? Was that a line from the show, an attempt to translate between cultures which I fully understand, or some writer trying to push forward into trans allegory for poor Wolf’s forced sex change…oh, no, this isn’t Furman’s Arcee all over again is it?…instead of letting the perception stand on its own? It’s hard to trust the honest of translators who show dishonesty and then celebrate it on Twitter. Eh, still a funny moment.
If you have a chance to see this show, tell me if it’s as good as the first episode, and let me know if poor people like me have a chance to see it or the manga it came from. Based on this episode both look like a lot of fun.
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