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REVIEW: The Shiunji Family Children Anime Series Review

I’m reading the manga to see how far they go down the romance hole and if Arata caves because I wouldn’t bet on another season being done.

I wanted to like this but it was clear quite early that it was going to be the harem spending about 12 episodes finding out if Arata was truly interested in them or not.

The almost cookie cutter character types also didn't help it much. Should have gone the incest route, would have been more interesting.

It's funny how the reviewer comes off really negative but then just kind of throws in there: "we have a pretty solid harem anime with well-written female characters" which is like practically giving it a good review aside from the reviewer not being able to get past the premise of the Harem.

Glordit wrote:

I wanted to like this but it was clear quite early that it was going to be the harem spending about 12 episodes finding out if Arata was truly interested in them or not. The almost cookie cutter character types also didn't help it much. Should have gone the incest route, would have been more interesting.

Yeah, I understand navigating feelings is hard and worthy of exploration, but if you're going to go for a story that specifically looks at walking the line between familial and romantic feelings then interest comes in at the tension between the feelings and the reality of the relationship.

For example, spoiler[From Up on Poppy Hill explored this effectively by pulling a double switcheroo. They let the characters grow close, then revealed there was a possibility they were related which caused them a lot of concern, then they discovered that one of them was a war orphan who was saved by someone and not a blood relative.] Even though that also ends up with the characters being not siblings, that worked for me because the story allowed the up and downs time to breathe so they could be given relevance in the story.

Shiunji Family Children felt to me like it wanted to milk the drama and taboo of that sort of situation, but by introducing the characters and immediately revealing the lack of blood relation we get none of the interesting emotions that come with that tension. Sure they navigated how the characters feel now that they are no longer blood related, but the timing of the story and how it skips over characterizing the relationships before so we can see how things changes makes that boring. If we got to know these characters for even a few episodes before revealing the inciting event, it would be so much more meaningful when we see how their relationships change with the news.

Instead we are just given an excuse for a standard harem set up except, besides their history and a few conflicted feelings the plot was indistinguishable from any other harem show. It is functionally the same as a childhood friend saying "oh no, we're such good friends! I can't make things weird" except he thought they were his sisters. Very rarely do I drop a show before I'm at least halfway through, but I had no will to see if it got better, it seemed to be settling comfortably into a harem formula and not pushing any boundaries.

I think with the final comment it's basically just saying that it's a decent harem but it doesn't commit to the bit hard enough with the sibling stuff. It's just set dressing to loop in people who are into incest stuff while also saying to the audience who isn't "don't worry guys, it's not incest at all!" off the bat. Also by confirming that one of the sisters will definitely win in flash-forwards, it kneecaps itself by taking a lot of potential drama out. Like, look, any harem show is basically gonna end with the protag getting together with one (or more) members of that harem, but usually they leave things vague to allow for new potential love interests to stir things up. By confirming the future, any other girl that Arata ever interacts with is an automatic red herring and the audience knows it.

I wanted to like this but it was clear quite early that it was going to be the harem spending about 12 episodes finding out if Arata was truly interested in them or not.

The almost cookie cutter character types also didn't help it much. Should have gone the incest route, would have been more interesting.