One of the things you don’t think about before you get engaged is how different the holidays will be. I’ve been traveling ever since my birthday, but luckily always to someplace with a wifi connection. To stay relaxed through it all, I’ve been powering through one of the Fall 2012 season’s most popular shows, My Little Monster.

For the uninitiated, My Little Monster is the story of a studious girl and the irreverent but violent delinquent she reluctantly falls in love with.

As you might expect, domestic violence is a heavily hinted underlying theme of this show. In fact, the reason I decided to pick it up was when I heard the male main character, Haru, threatens to rape main female character Shizuku in the very first episode. Readers who know me as one half of the Sexism in Anime Fandom panel might be scratching their heads right now.

Like I said in the panel though, having issues with sexism in some anime doesn’t mean we need to stop watching all anime, or even all possibly sexist anime. I believe that it’s important to remain an active consumer of anime in order for my opinion to be at all relevant to creators. As I told Goboiano:

Basically, we anime fans talk with our dollars. We need to show licensors not only that we’re paying customers, but what we will and will not put up with. So if we buy a show and think it’s sexist, we should say that. “I bought this show and I didn’t like X.” It certainly worked for hundreds of thousands of unhappy Mass Effect 3 customers, who got the actual ending of the game changed by buying it and then being dissatisfied.

If an anime is problematic and your response is to boycott it, licensors have no incentive to change because you’re not a paying customer anyway.

So, back to My Little Monster, AKA girl meets psychopath. In any other context, Haru would be a man any woman in her right mind ought to back away from, taser at the ready. But at every opportunity, his sociopathic behavior is played for jokes and tempered with cuteness. Scary: he doesn’t want a girl to leave him, so he declares a desire to tear off her arms and legs. Cute: he has a pet chicken he brings to school! Scary: he puts a girl in a chokehold with hardly any provocation. Cute: he trusts other people’s good intentions to a fault. Haru’s impulsive behavior is made to seem childish, just a phase, just “boys will be boys.”

It helps to alleviate the threat when Shizuku, isn’t having any of it. When Haru tries to control her by forbidding her to go to cram school or speak to a rival, Shizuku barks, “You can’t tell me what to do!” Shizuku’s mere presence can also keep Haru from having a violent episode. She’s not afraid to stand up to him or put him in his place, making him seem less harmful than he really is.

Thanks to this dynamic, My Little Monster sets a dangerous example for romantic relationships. It teaches that the right girl, with love and tenderness, can reform a violent boy. It implies that anyone with violent tendencies has a good heart underneath, and will respond to reason.

There’s just one problem with my argument. I can’t stop watching.

I may have issues with some of the characters’ relations, but I love how their personalities break the shoujo mold. There are plenty of cute moments, and an interesting, up-tempo pace. I’ll be looking forward to how it ends, and I won’t feel like a hypocrite for doing so.

Basically, if I vowed to stop watching any show with sexist elements, I’d have to quit watching American TV, too, and probably most commercials. It’s a big problem that won’t go away overnight, or probably even in my lifetime. The solution isn’t to quit on shows, but to educate yourself to recognize problematic themes when you see them.

It bothers me that Haru’s violence is being played as a personality quirk, but I’m glad I’m able to make that assessment. And since most girls growing up today are taught to be adequately scared of men, I am confident adult viewers can separate this impossible fiction from a potentially dark reality.

My Little Monster is the seventh most popular show on Crunchyroll right now. Are you watching it? What do you think?

On Monday I wrote about how to write an anime review people will actually want to read. Today, I tried to take my own advice. Did I succeed? You be the judge!

You’ll notice that Nerima Daikon Brothers isn’t like any other anime you’ve seen before as soon as the characters open their mouths. It’s a musical! Full of catchy, upbeat tunes ranging from pop-jazz to pop-punk—with matching dance numbers—music carries most of the dialogue and all of the plot.

On the surface, Nerima Daikon Brothers is a character parody of Saturday Night Live’s Blues Brothers. Their slick costumes, propensity to break into song, and good natured but helpless inability to stay on the right side of the law all take cues from their Western inspiration.

But the similarities end there, replaced by a generous helping of Weird Japan. The anime is brought to you by Shinichi Watanabe, the director who both produced and appeared in Excel Saga as the afro-sporting Nabeshin. His absurd sense of humor is apparent in every episode.

Hardworking, guileless Hideki, easygoing prettyboy Ichiro, and avaricious minx Mako dream of being musicians and building a concert dome. But in the meantime, they get by in the Nerima ward of Tokyo by farming daikons—sweet white radishes—inexplicably in the middle of the city. Also inexplicably, they’re plagued by a plucky, daikon-stealing panda, Pandaikon.

Very little of the plot has anything to do with the brothers’ dreams of fame. They keep getting sidetracked by every farcical villain in town, from a corrupt chief of police to a fraudulent fortune teller. The brothers intend to steal from these fiends and fund their Daikon Dome, but their good hearts and values keep getting the best of them.

Each confrontation is full of slapstick and obscene sexual humor that has brothers and bad guys having laughable trysts with one another or, more frequently, Pandaikon. When the going gets tough, the brothers visit a shady character who looks a lot like Nabeshin and sing for their dinner… er, a rental item to give them an edge.

The songs are infectious and will stick in your head long after each of the show’s twelve thirty-minute episodes are over. Which is a good thing, because the plot—or what there is of it—won’t. Outrageous battles, crass sexual humor, and over-the-top depictions of corruption serve as a vehicle for commentary on Japan’s society and political structure.

Unfortunately, when anime takes its cues from real life, it gets dated quickly. Younger fans may not recognize the parodies of late pop star Michael Jackson or former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. And for Western fans, the English dub is a must. Director Chris Ayres took liberties with some of the less recognizable parodies of Japanese business people. (A word of warning—he also took liberties with the language, and the dub is rife with crass language.)

Visually, Nerima Daikon Brothers is sloppy. It looks like it was animated in a hurry, like even the creators couldn’t stop humming along to the show long enough to bother with it. Somehow, it’s the perfect depiction for this celebration of joy and wackiness. How can you care about clean lines when you’re holding your sides laughing at the Chief of Police and Yakuza boss trying to convince the brothers they’re devotedly in love, the better to avoid corruption charges?

Western reception of Nerima Daikon Brothers has been lukewarm. Anime News Network gave it a B-. The Fandom Post gave it a slightly higher B. To me, however, it’s the perfect anime. The songs are as catchy as commercial jingles. The humor is so over the top I don’t question it. The fact that it’s a musical gives me permission to suspend my disbelief. Whenever I am going through a really dark time, I put this on and almost instantly, things don’t seem so bad.

If you value plot in an anime, Nerima Daikon Brothers isn’t for you. But if you just want to turn off your brain, look no further than this.

Grade: 4/5 stars. Energetic musical numbers, wacky humor, a lacking and dated plot.