The summer of 2015 was an unusually lewd anime season, just in time for international simultaneous online broadcast to become the norm. Within this one season were two shows: "Prison School" (a show featuring delinquent students imprisoned under a well-endowned female student council) and "Shimoneta" (a comedy about erotic terrorist students trying to bring back dirty jokes in a world where they are legally banned). Interestingly, both were animated by J.C. Staff."Shimoneta's" full title ("Shimoneta - A Boring World Where The Concept of Dirty Jokes Doesn't Exist") makes the plot self-explanitory. In an alternate near-future Japan, a country once known as the capital of sexual innuendo for entertainment, porn and other offensive material has been banned entirely. Porn magazines are burned, and tracking devices on all citizens tracks anyone who dares even utter a potty joke. Naturally, it isn't a healthy environment if children grow up not even knowing what sex is, but the country seems peaceful under this new order. But Ayame won't have it: under disguise as the terrorist "Blue Snow" of the organization "SOX," she runs around her school and downtown Japan wearing a white sheet (and nothing else), yelling profanities and throwing sexy propoganda everywhere she goes. The show starts when she ropes in another student (the naturally unwilling Tanukichi) to join her in her sexcapades, introducing him to the other members of the party and the importance of their work.From the start, there were two promising angles "Shimoneta" was assumed to take. The first was that the show would go out of its way to be naughty, and the second was a potentially earnest political statement about the importance of free speech and natural sexuality. The sex jokes are largely through puns, almost all directly from Ayame's foul mouth, but get old very fast. When the script writers felt the need to throw at least one sex joke a minute for the entirety of the season, it can be expected that most of them aren't particularly funny or clever. This seems even worse off in the English dub, for despite Funimation's best intentions, verbal humor is difficult to translate well from Japanese, where grammer, spelling and pronounciation all add the the joke. Sometimes the series does earn a chuckle in the ridiculousness of the scenes (there's a particularly inspired scene featuring a sex tape of two insects that confuse most of the student body), or the shock of what the characters talk about to each other in broad daylight, but against modern anime, these jokes aren't as shocking as they want to be. Perversion is its own genre of anime, and it isn't hard to find plenty of other material with more extreme titilation for fun and profit.While ineffectively tame at first, things take a turn about halfway into the show when Anna, Tanukichi's childhood crush, gets involved. She's the student council president and a model citizen, but at first is ironically naive and ignorant to what sex is, completely missing out on any sex jokes that accidently come her way. But after an accidental kiss when Tanukichi is on the run from authorities, a gear kicks in, and Anna starts getting strange urges without knowing exactly what they are. And so she becomes one of the most unhealthy perverted characters in anime, the lengths of which go farther than I've seen in other shows. In particular, she drips. A lot. There is typically a puddle as she walks down a hallway. And multiple times, she tries to confess her love to Tanukichi, but does so in ways that feel more like full rape than usual (rape happens a lot for comedy in anime, but typically the man is secretly into it, where here it feels like it crosses a legitimate line). Ann provides plenty of fanservice for fans that were looking for it, but it doesn't feel particularly funny, and certainly not realistic in how a woman might react to a first kiss. It never fully cashes in on how it makes commentary on the dangers of not explaining healthy ways to deal with nautral urges.
And by the last few episodes, the plot takes a slightly more serious turn when a rival terrorist group, inspired by the efforts of "SOX," commits their own crimes. But instead of propoganda, they take students hostage, and their views on sex are unhealthy compared to Ayame's pure goals. At least, they're supposed to be. It's here that the plot fails: the new group proudly wears used underwear on their faces, and clearly represents perversion rather then sexual freedom, the kind that would celebrate pornography over mutual interaction. But this is a very fine line, and it isn't clear exactly where that line divides the good and bad sides of the arguement. Depending on your personal views, you may fully agree with the good side, or think both are fully in the right, or think both should be locked up in jail. Nothing represents this better than the "#metoo" movement that gained steam from 2017 onwards, revealing to the shock of many that not everyone wants to have sex with anyone at all times of the day. To many, this made common sense, but to others, this was legitimately baffling. Sex is a delicate and personal subject, and even though it is natural, the human race still doesn't have a good way to deal with it in society. "Shimoneta" is about extreme views on all sides, but even the "right" side we are supposed to agree with isn't an acceptable point of view for everyone.So "Shimoneta" is a show with a political message that no one can fully agree on, with comedy that feels lazy and poorly written, and with fanservice that feels more uncomfortable than most other anime. It isn't entirely without merit: if you are the type of person who giggles at the word "penis" or "vajayjay," you will probably laugh a lot more, and perhaps even agree with the themes it tries to convey. As for me, even if the theme is important to talk about, I'll remain a stick in the mud for this one, and go back to some other harem fanservice anime instead.