English Dub Review: Million Arthur “Rotten Art”

Two episodes focusing on cross-dressing in one day? What a drag!

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The Arthurs have been on a pretty solid streak as of late, though nothing can get that stick out of Kakka’s ass. One night, a report of a distortion comes in, so he decides to take care of it himself with Brigitte under everyone’s nose and show his superiority to Dancho. Unfortunately for him, Dancho and Nuckelavee tag along to help out. The target ends up being at a private school for girls, meaning that they’re going to need to go undercover in disguise…including Kakka for some reason.

The fairies seem to take to the school setting a bit TOO well, and Dancho is clearly just in this to ogle cute girls, so Kakka ends up being the only one who stays on task in search of the Excalibur, which starts running him ragged. Soon after, he runs into Millia, the president of the Art Club who asks Kakka to model for them, meaning multiple costume changes and poses. But when he tries to flee, Millia reveals her Excalibur, a giant paint brush, and that she knew he was a boy from the start. She plans to have him pose for her forever, otherwise she’ll show off the portraits they’ve done of him…which seems like it’ll happen anyway.

And her motivation for being this way is because she made a marriage promise with a friend, pledging that they’d stay together no matter how they changed…but then when he changed into a hulking dude, she saw it as him breaking that promise. So she’ll keep painting to preserve boy’s youth for her own sake! But that insanity is short lived as Dancho, Nuckelavee, and Brigitte show up to save Kakka!…after apparently having been watching for awhile. So they break the Excalibur and head home, not finding out until later that Millia kept selling paintings of Kakkaa for a long time after they left to much success. But apparently the fairies stayed behind to live the lives of schoolgirls for a little longer.

OUR TAKE

You know…last week I talked about how I liked that episode’s silliness in how it handled its premise and characters. This episode is definitely silly in parts, but it really leans more on the side of stupid and kinda gross. It’s more of a Kakka focused story than the third episode where he was paired with Tekken, and through that we can determine that he is the type of character who is all work and no play, which is why it worked to play him off someone as brash and fun as Tekken (and I assume Brigitte, who doesn’t really seem to have much of a personality like a lot of the other fairies). Putting him with Dancho for THIS episode is not necessarily a bad combo, since she’s arguably even more about having fun and being friendly, so I can see a lot of potentially interesting scenarios where their clashing mindsets could find common ground to complete a typical mission.

The problem is that this episode seems to less focused on character dynamics and more on fetish fuel. And not even GOOD fetish fuel. I mean, tastes vary from person to person, sure, but the preppy schoolgirl fantasy seems pretty niche in appeal on its own, let alone cross-dressing guys and the girls who drool all over them. This is by no means a judgment if someone reading this happens to be into those things, but they don’t serve the episode or characters and really only end up devolving the plot into a nonsensical and uncomfortable mess. I could see how making Kakka pretend to be a girl could possibly give him an opportunity to put on another identity and embrace a funner side to himself, but what he get is basically him being kidnapped and victimized by some unhinged girl who doesn’t seem to understand the concept of aging.

It also doesn’t make Dancho look very good either. Imagine for a second that she was a dude and suddenly all her drooling and perverted talk gets a lot less cute and a lot more creepy, which only makes it worse when it turns out she could have saved Kakka from his torture for awhile but just sat and watched it happen for her own enjoyment until it got to a certain point. If Kakka didn’t have faith in her leadership before, I don’t know how he or Yamaneko or ANYONE could ever trust her to lead them again knowing she allowed this to happen

Look, I have no illusions about what kind of show this supposed to be, for better or worse. But I have seen it fare way better than this with the tools at its disposal, so even the low standards I’ve set for it make an episode like this inexcusable.