The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made

Episode 11

To Whomever Finds This,

I've lost track of how many weeks have passed since I last saw another living person. The wasteland that the Idiot God has left behind in his wake is barren of anything you could reasonably consider “life”. There is only ash, and ruins, and that incessant, maddening screeching. As I write these words, the blood red moon is looming large above me, still. It has not set in all this time. I don't even know if the sun exists anymore. The only thing I can remember now is—“

Actually, you know what? No. Nuh-uh. Nah. I can't, this time. As much fun as it has been reporting the absolutely factual chronicles of my time reviewing The Fruit of Evolution, this week's episode made me take a good, long look in the mirror and think about what I was doing. Like, with my life. Here I am, spending hours and hours of my life—not to mention thousands of words—writing about a show that has been given about as much care and attention as when your cat leaves a nasty old turd right outside the litterbox. Sure, something made it, and they left it there for all the world to see, and it would probably be wrong to just ignore the thing as it sits there stinking up the joint…but when you find yourself cleaning up the same nasty mess, week after week, you have to sit back and make some serious assessments about your life choices.

It's not a great metaphor, I know, mostly because it's totally unfair to compare the theoretical cat of this scenario to the creative team behind The Fruit of Evolution. A cat is just an adorable little animal, and it has a limited number of options to consider when it comes time to squeeze out a fresh hot log of feline fecal matter. What if its owner hasn't cleaned the litter box in a day or two? What if the cat decided to be extra bold and chew up its owners expensive earbuds in the middle of the night, thus instigating a bout of indigestion? It's not easy being an animal in a human world, and sometimes you end up taking a crap on the carpet. That's life. You can't blame the cat.

The Fruit of Evolution, though? It has been deliberately and maliciously dropping a steaming load of animated dookie all over our eyeballs every single week, and I can absolutely blame for it. And for anyone out there who might be sitting aghast at their computer screens, thinking that I've finally gone off the deep end with these disgusting metaphors, I can only ask: Have you seen this fucking show? Don't answer that, theoretical reader; it's a rhetorical question. I know you haven't seen it. If you had, you wouldn't be reading this review; you'd be obliterating your senses with whichever intoxicating substance you can legally get your hands on, or doing whatever else it takes to wipe the experience of this show from your memory banks.

How do I know this? Well, let me just rummage through my Big Bag Of Incriminating Evidence right here and see what I've got…ah, yes! Behold:

In case you are only just tuning in for the first time this week, well, for one thing, I am so sorry. You will never get the time you spent watching this show back. Those minutes of your life have been stolen from you, and The Fruit of Evolution will feast on that energy like a vampire. Also, this is the closest thing to a “joke” that The Fruit of Evolution can conceptualize, what with it having the imaginative capacity of an exceptionally horny gerbil.

You see, the guy in the thong is Guscle. He's a masochist bodybuilder from the local Hero's Guild, which is filled to the brim with sex perverts. Guscle screams and grunts a lot, and he is constantly pulling smelly items of import out of his crotch for our heroes. That is literally everything there is to know about the character. In this scene, he his exposing his genitals to the royal court and yelling “Long time, no bridge!” I think the joke is that he is referencing a sexual position, using a pun that I can only pray actually makes sense in Japanese.

Then, you have Eris. She's a sadist from the Hero's Guild. That is literally everything there is to know about her character. She's making a play on Guscle's previous non-joke by amending the greeting to “Long time, no shit!” In her hands, she's holding what I think is some kind of enema pump, or maybe one of those butt plugs people use to prep themselves for a session of pegging? Either way, it got shoved into Guscle's butthole a couple of episodes ago. And she said “shit”, which is a naughty word that only grown-ups are supposed to say.

That's the joke. Like every other joke that this show has ever attempted to make, it is really dumb, juvenile, and lazy. Also, for those of you who haven't seen the anime in motion, every shot of The Fruit of Evolution looks as if it was animated by a single person that was being held at gunpoint, and with a budget of whatever coins they could fish out of a nearby gutter before getting abducted by the show's production committee. So, minus points for that, too.

I mean, what else do you want from me? Do you want me to talk about the scene where the Flasher Guy of the Hero's Guild just whips out his dick and screams about it for a minute or two? Or should I react to when the gang of hoodlums from the Hero's Guild all shove their fists right into a monster's butthole to defeat it? Maybe you want me to critically analyze the bit where the large adult man that has a bandolier of breast milk strapped to his body and a pacifier jammed in his mouth jumps into the monstrous fray and declares: “If you all keep me from enjoying my milk play, you'll face wesponsibiwity!” I suppose there's the faintest possibility that someone out there genuinely wants me to break down the ins-and-outs of the increasingly self-serious plot, what with its boss monster battles and “epic” fight scenes and the random cameos from those pointless classmates of Seiichi's…

This is where I'm tempted to say something pithy like “Watching any one of the scenes I just described is to watch the death of Comedy itself.” Except it isn't just “the death of Comedy”; that makes it sound too passive, like some kind of unavoidable terminal illness, or like if the show accidentally ran Comedy off the road in a reckless drunk driving accident. No, The Fruit of Evolution is far more sinister. It is a sociopathic murderer that targets jokes instead of people. It's an anime Ted Bundy that stalks and hunts Comedy down, carves into the vital organs of Comedy over and over again, drinks Comedy's blood, and then buries the unrecognizable scraps of Comedy's leftover pieces in some anonymous ditch. “I am the Devil,” sneers The Fruit of Evolution as it stands over Comedy's unmarked grave, “And I'm here to do the Devil's work.”

I am not here simply to review The Fruit of Evolution. I am here to pass down the sentence that is to be carried out against this wretched show, as decreed by a jury of its peers. For the crimes that The Fruit of Evolution has committed against Comedy, and against every unfortunate victim that was unfortunate enough to gaze upon its dark work, in just one week's time it will finally be put down like the sick creature that it is.

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The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made is currently streaming on Crunchyroll. James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.