Just lately I got acquaintanced with the feeling of grabbing a red-hot plate with both hands and thus burning them in an epic fail fashion. Because of the burning pain I wasn’t able to type properly, game or even clean the food from the floor until three hours. And during those three very, very painful hours I had an idea.
I’m no masochist. I hate feeling pain, be it physical or emotional. However, as we know about burns, the pain sticks around for quite a long time (mine were second degree burns, the damn blisters are still there) during which you can’t really have your fingers outside the water glass for more than 30 seconds. Or hell, make it 15. But I don’t really like having my fingers soaking in a glass of water all the time, so I decided to research some alternate methods. Just lately there has been a burst of very shitty anime. Very, very shitty anime that makes you feel like blisters are forming on your eyeballs after two first eps in. My idea was to exploit this characteristic to its fullest. If I was able to torment my eyes and brain to the max, then maybe, just maybe, the pain in my hands would disappear.
Internets came to the rescue and the contest for maximal pain was ready to begin. Of course it took longer than the couple of hours the physical pain sticking around, but I realized a chance to finally post something somewhat sensible and carried on with the experiment, with the burning pain still fresh in my memory. So here you have the contestants for the prize of the maximum amount of pain and misery.
Pain and cancer ahead. You can still turn back.
But enough of the introduction babble and enter the contestants! I decided to mix in a few older shows to see how they perform against the latest and greatest out there.
5th place: Code Geass – Lelouch of the HUGE-ASS-GRUDGEFUL-LESBIAN-BOMB Rebellion R2
Taking the absurdity to the level of which even Franz Kafka would be proud, CG R2 truly is in no need of further introduction. However after kur0gan3 made me realize that the entire show is in fact a masterpiece – Sunrise trolling the fans in such epic fashion that can only happen once a decade – CG R2′s painfulness factor suffered a considerable stall. In fact Rocket Emperor made me laugh so much that it only made the physical pain worse.
Painfulness factor: *
4th place: Sky Girls Xenoglossia Strike Witches
Although initially a strong candidate, Strike Witches didn’t end up being all that painful to watch aside from eye-watering CGI-scenes oh so typical of GONZO; instead it kept recycling the tried and true emotional issues of a side character solved in the end by the lead character’s newcomer spirit. As counter-pain entertainment Strike Witches fails and mainly brings up sentiments of depression and hay-have-i-seen-this-before?
Painfulness factor: **
Yawn-factor: ***
Deja vú-counter: 8999
3rd place: Ikki Tousen
Time to change flying lolis to panty-flashing fight maniac Hakufu whose top neckline is wide enough for a train to drive through. Basically Ikki Tousen has three things we all love about anime: Hot girls, fighting and hot girls fighting. Or does it? I thought it wouldn’t be too hard to keep all these three at reasonable quality, but Ikki Tousen lacks in the last mentioned – and pretty bad too. The fights are so eventful that someone could put them all together in one video and upload it on YouTube titled A day in the life of a Runescape player. That is, though, if the fights even actually happen on screen and are not skipped with scene cutting that would be excellent not-like-this-example material for Look Ma I’m Makin’ a Movie 101 seminar in Hollywood. Because Ikki Tousen scenes are all more or less repetition of each other, I made a handy chart that illustrates their structure.
Long story short, Ikki Tousen is rather painful to watch and easily defeats some of the newcomers in this regard. However, I must deduct some points because while my brain was suffering, one smaller part of me was very happy.
Painfulness factor: ***
Lyle’s constant: Boobs.
2nd place: Zero no Tsukaima – The Princess of Too Small Boobs Terrible Noto Role Rondo
THESE WOUNDS, THEY WILL NEVER HEAL
Painfulness factor: *****
Additional casualties: Right mouse button
1st place: ToHeart 2
As aurabolt once said, ARIA that takes place in a Japanese high school instead of a scifi-version of Venice. The painful thing about TH2 is the fact that it’s a long, boring grind that could rival an intercontinental flight in economy class any day. Very recommended if you fly around a lot and might work as an anaesthetic though if given enough time. Otherwise the show isn’t all that painful to watch…until the episodes 8 and 9 when the two most annoying beings on earth appear – San and Ruri. Didn’t feel pain in my fingers. In fact, I didn’t feel anything at all. I think it’s because of their hellish voice somehow disconnecting my brain from the rest of the body, making me unable to stop the suffering before the episode ends.
Painfulness factor: *****+
And so the experiment has concluded, with ToHeart 2 emerging as the ultimately most pain-causing show of the group. Even though in the end old school took the pot home, the third installment of Zero no Tsukaima put up an admirable fight, in fact I was ready to declare it as the winrar until I hit TH2 episodes mentioned earlier. In any event, the top three were all rather effective pain management methods and I can wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone with burning fingers. I think the only reason why these aren’t already being used in hospitals for this purpose are the possible nasty side-effects effects due to long-term exposure. That, or Uwe Boll’s movies are already filling in for that need.
