Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita Episode 4 – Rules of Press

While this is kind of an… odd… concept for an episode, it still is actually pretty funny and entertaining, although I’m not quite sure what this actually has to do with the decline and death of the human race.  Normally when I think about the human race dying out, I don’t instantly jump to a group of people trapped inside of a manga that they have to make a best-seller in order to escape, but I guess that’s just what you get with this show.  But like I said, even though it doesn’t really make much sense, and it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the series (though I guess there isn’t really much that could) it’s still entertaining and fun to watch.  And that Chess scene was fucking awesome.  Hilariously awesome to the utmost degree.

So, like last week’s episode, this one is also a heavy satire of the manga industry, it’s fandom and what it takes to sell manga, although it could really apply to any form of entertainment.  This time our almost unnamed heroes have to find a way to make the manga they’re trapped in become the number one selling manga in the world so they can conclude the series, thus escaping the manga they’re trapped in.  Yeah, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either, but thankfully Pink Girl can’t make too much sense out of the whole thing either, but goes with it anyway because they have to get out.  As she’s been so far, she stands as the voice of reason in such a ridiculous and crazy situation.   Her and Y are also really funny together in my opinion, because they’re different and play off each other, but they aren’t complete and total opposites like most comedy pairs in anime.  And since these people obviously know what they’re doing when it comes to crazy stuff like this, they have some pretty good jokes along the way of their ridiculous adventure.  Although it may be sad to admit, there’s a lot of truth to what’s said in this episode.  Like most long running manga, as they go on, they make their plot increasingly ridiculous and more complex in order to keep the three second attention span of the average reader.  I also thought the whole twist thing was pretty clever, seeing as how when a series or manga starts to do that, that’s usually a good jumping off point, because it’s a definite sign the creator has run out of ideas to do.

Although it is pretty entertaining, it’s just so out of left field that it doesn’t really make any sense.  With the episode last week, the reintroduction of manga into society made sense because it could happen in the context of a world that hasn’t had those things in a long time.  It made sense because it was just a clever way to retell the history of the growth of manga and it’s fandom all while poking fun at how ridiculous most of it is.  But here, it just felt like they wanted to make fun of manga more, but didn’t have any real way to do so, so in the end they just said, “Fuck it, let’s put them in some random blank manga”.  Well, yeah sure, I guess you could do that but it doesn’t really make a lot of sense… “Well, it’ll be a dream for fucks sake, we’re making fun of manga, goddammit!”.  And I’m sure that’s how that creative meeting went.  And although I’m bringing up this point about how crazily random the plot device for this episode was, it’s probably not very fair to hold it to such a high level of scrutiny, seeing as how batshit insane the show’s been so far.  I really do hope that this series can have a bit more of a focus next week or at the very least take some time to explain what exactly is going on in this crazy world.  I still enjoy it and find it funny, but I still want to hold out hope that there’s some type of underlying story that’s coming eventually.