Aho-Girl’s Over-the-Top Humor Misses the Mark

Diomedea

Think back to your adolescent years for a moment. There was always one person in every middle school: that one student who wanted to be the class clown but just didn’t have the charm, talent, or comedic timing to pull it off. They would stand up in the middle of class and tell a joke that either nobody got or found even remotely funny. Or maybe they would try to cause trouble by playing pranks on teachers or fellow students, but said pranks wound up being either mean-spirited or poorly executed.

What does being a wannabe class clown have to do with anime, you ask? Well, that’s Aho-Girl (Idiot-Girl) in a nutshell.

I came across Diomedea’s 2017 romantic comedy around the time it was first released, with short clips from the very first episode being the first thing that I watched. The title alone got me curious, as the word “idiot” is typically translated as baka in Japanese. After completing the series, however, I wish I had remained a curious bystander and had not decided to watch it at all.

Like 95 percent of all slice-of-life rom-com anime, Aho-Girl stars a girl (in this case Yoshiko Hanabatake) who is not only academically hopeless but socially inept as well. She frequently ropes her friends into mindless shenanigans, often with the dimwitted redhead ending up getting pummeled in a cartoonish fashion, usually by her childhood “friend” and crush, Ak-kun.

Obviously, comedy is a highly subjective genre. I understand that there are plenty of people out there who find this sort of humor to be laugh-out-loud hilarious (just look at MyAnimeList’s ratings for the show), but I am not one of those people. To me, the slapstick and, at times, lewd humor in Aho-Girl is pretty excessive and seems almost forced, so just getting through a single episode was just too—and I do not use this word very often—cringey.

Moreover, I think there is something to be said about limiting physical violence in a comedy show (of any kind, not just anime). While it’s true that the way Yoshiko gets beaten up is over-the-top and not meant to be realistic, and she does often “deserve” it because of her antics, it’s done too frequently for my liking. If I had to offer an educated guess, I would say it happens 5 to 10 times in a single episode. It’s a wonder Yoshiko hasn’t sustained any adverse side effects from the frequent injuries at the end of it all, let alone lost interest in Ak-kun due to his abusive nature. To me, this excess of mean-spiritedness is one of the biggest turn-offs about this show.

The only real plus of the show that I can think of is its cast of characters. For better or worse, every single character is memorable in their own way, from the banana-obsessed titular aho girl, Yoshiko, to the straight man Ak-kun and even minor characters such as reformed delinquent Ryūichi and stalker authority figure Fūki.

So, if off-the-wall slapstick comedy is your cup of tea, you might highly enjoy Aho-Girl. As for me, however, I will be returning my attention to classic Yu-Gi-Oh!: Duel Monsters episodes. At least the violence there is between holographic monsters and, more importantly, means something.