English Dub Review: 18if “Idols Don’t Go To The Bathroom!”

What is this. I don’t even.

Overview (Spoilers)

Okay, so there’s this idol group, and they all hate their “pure-one” idol (Misaki) because she’s getting star treatment. Of course, she works harder than the rest of them, so she’s earned it, but they all just assume she’s sleeping her way to the top. When she’s hospitalized by a crazed fan with a knife, she slips into Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. She pulls her assailant, her group, her manager, and even the execs for a movie deal she was working on into her territory. It’s Nightmare Idol School. Of course, that means that the men have to be turned into girls. Misaki, now the Witch of Youthful Beauty, manifests as a dominatrix, whipping the girls (and “girls”) across their breasts, turning them into poop, lighting their crotches o…. You know what… No. I’m done.

Haruto is in there, too, by the way. He’s a big fan of Misaki, and is enjoying every minute of this until Lily shows up and outs him as an intruder and man. When everyone else is willing to go hardcore deviant BDSM on him, but she can’t, he escapes and tells her the truth. She isn’t a bad Idol, and she isn’t holding herself back for her fans. She’s been holding herself back because performing is her dream. She wakes up, quits the idol group, and goes solo.

Our Take

I… just give me a moment. With a title like “Idols Don’t Go To The Bathroom”, I was expecting some gross stuff. I was not expecting a dive off into the fetish end. This episode was like watching Puni Puni Poemy all over again. Did they change the director on this? It’s such a drastic tone and content shift from the norm that if Lily hadn’t shown up halfway through, I would have thought I was watching the wrong show. The characters don’t behave in a way that I feel is… normal. And I’m not even talking about Haruto and Misaki. We already know they’re a bit off their rockers.

While one of the male characters protests initially to being forcibly gender-swapped, within seconds, all four men just dive head-first into the concept. Somehow, I would have expected a little more resistance to this. Nope. They all just go “Yay! This is my fetish!” and move on. You might argue that this is a dream world, so they know these bodies aren’t real. If that were true, why go along with anything she’s telling them to do? Then, upon discovering Haruto is a man, they all jump on board with extreme BDSM torture. Really? You’re saying that everyone in that group is okay with this? I can understand this content in here. Misaki is the “pure-one” who has been unfairly painted as a harlot, so she’s attacking others how they (metaphorically) attacked her. I get it. But to have nine people all go “yeah, let’s shove a carrot up his butt” (actual example), and it’s the witch who objects? This kind of character writing is like what you would expect from erotic fan fiction, not the actual show with professional writers.

Let me be clear, while the content of the episode is fetishistic, you don’t actually see anything. Tops get slashed off with whips, but they have pasties on underneath. Haruto gets a monster erection but keeps it under his skirt. Even the vomit is swapped out for a stream of rainbow fluid. This only highlights how unnecessary this episode’s content was. The better direction could have presented the exact same content without rubbing our noses in it. I don’t need the camera fixated on his crotch when you can show me his shocked face and have him (do the normal thing and) try to cover it up. For that matter, why are you going to give me an entire sequence of his penis turning into a genie and cementing everyone to the walls with white goo? This episode was vulgar for vulgarity’s sake, and nowhere near what I was expecting from this show. The previous episode hinted that they might be moving along into a deeper, character-based arc with a bit more plot. Instead, we get…

Enough of that. Voice acting. I wish I had hit mute and turned on closed captioning. The characters were all high-pitched and emotionally flat. Make that worse, we have the same song from the “Shark Girls” show at the beginning of the episode done on repeat. It sounds as if a twelve-year-old girl wanted to be the next Spice Girls by herself and poorly autotuned herself into a quintet with lyrics written by her five-year-old sister. All the voices in the song were all up in the same range, in the same timing, with no harmony. Then, we look at the song from the ending credits. It isn’t amazing, but it is three times as artful and pleasant to hear as that garbage. Also, Let’s talk about Misaki. I didn’t believe a single thing she said. She sounded so much like a little girl, she couldn’t sound menacing to save her life. Her “evil laughter” sounded like a violin falling down the stairs. In fact… lessee… only two people in this whole episode was believable in either writing or voice acting. Lily, who had three lines, and Dr. Katz, who didn’t talk at all. He just covered his face with his hat and tried not to look at Haruto in the buff.

As far as art and animation, this series very rarely does it for me. They tried in a couple episodes to do some crazy stuff, and they did one GORGEOUS episode with a child-like art style. The remainder of the show has lackluster art and animation that only vaguely resembles the source material. This episode was of the latter. In fact, it was also loaded with facial errors and odd art choices that made it look just plain ugly. Lots of cycled frames and recycled footage. Makes me think even the animators didn’t want to see what they were drawing…

So, terrible art, terrible voice acting, inelegant direction, and vulgar, tasteless writing that forces the characters into breaking character to follow the writer’s fetishes. This episode was BAD. I don’t expect a huge amount from this show, but this didn’t even live up to that. I advise you to skip this episode entirely. Fortunately, the series is episodic enough that I assume this was a one-time thing. There are only three more episodes left in the series from what I can see, so they need to start going somewhere with the plot. Otherwise, that will be a whole mess of time I ain’t getting back. I give this episode two (Yes, my lowest score yet) out of ten.