English Dub Review: The Helpful Fox Senko-San “As Long As You’re Happy!”

Boys are dogs, girls are cats, and underage foxes are illegal.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Senko and Nanako play a fighting videogame together. Nanako plays a character that looks a little bit like Senko, and he is able to beat the real Senko handily. She throws a small tantrum, but the two reconcile quickly and start roughhousing around the apartment. Nanako was promised another touch of Senko’s fur as a prize, and he aims to collect posthaste. All of their horsing around, however, rouse Nanako’s neighbor, Koenji. She goes over to knock on his door, trying to tell him to quiet down, but the occupants cannot hear her. Eventually, she barges in, seeing Senko and thinking the worst.

Nanako does everything he can to come up with a convincing lie to tell Koenji about her presence in the apartment, but Senko telling the truth about her age is what ends up setting her mind at ease. The wheels are greased, too, by Senko’s offer of leftovers. Over the reheated meal, Koenji reveals that she is a part-time college student who works from home. Senko is impressed with her hustle and promises her leftovers whenever she wants, much to Senko’s chagrin. Koenji questions Senko’s fox tail, but Nanako and the demigod manage to trick her by making her think that she is a very serious cosplayer for a popular fox girl anime.  Eventually, their new friend must head back to her own apartment, but she leaves with a drastically improved attitude and a full stomach.

Now alone in the apartment, Senko becomes addicted to the fox anime. She watches every episode, and still wants more. After she finished the series, Nanako and Senko realize that they have completely run out of food. Senko wants to go to the store, but Nanako tells her that it is too suspicious to go alone without a disguise. Nanako dresses Senko up in a ridiculous newsboy hat, and the two set off for the supermarket. Upon arrival, Senko is wildly impressed with the progress that global capitalism has made in the past two generations. She marvels at the wide variety of vegetables and the pre-fried tofu on the shelves. She is almost recognized, to the dismay of her human companion, but she insists that she is too clever to be caught. She loads up Nanako’s basked with a bevy of fried tofu and other vegetables, and then the two set off for home. In the final moments of the episode, Senko accidentally makes the potato she chose sprout with her magic.

Overview

It has reached the point where I feel like I’m being baited. Not once, but twice, were there mise en abyme that teased the loli that I was grateful that the main show seemed to have removed from itself, at least for the week. In addition to that, the plot of the first half of the episode was all about Seijo being very suspicious about the underage girl in Nanako’s apartment. I know that we are going to be stuck with this character for the rest of the series (She is the title character after all, and I don’t see her choosing an age-appropriate form anytime soon), but at some point rubbing in that the show got away with having a loli character wears thin. That point is about minute two of episode one, by the way, but I digress.

I need to get that out of the way early this week (because I refuse to not comment on a show that employs something so vile) because this is actually the best episode of the show so far. It actually has a plot besides relegating Senko to indentured servitude, and it has planted a number of seeds that will no doubt grow into the plots of future episodes. Koenji is a welcome addition to this incredibly small cast and definitely made the first half of the episode fly by while she was onscreen. While this episode was far from perfect, this is the first time that it actually functioned mostly as a show and not soft-core fetish pornography.

The episode has revealed that the show is going to rely on a particularly gross trope, however. In his Pop Culture Detective Series, Jonathan McIntosh coins the term “Born Sexy Yesterday”. In a Born Sexy Yesterday scenario, an otherworldly woman encounters a very average man, and the story has them fall in love in some way. It is immediately clear what the woman offers the man, her looks, her charms, her extra-human powers, and the chance for the protagonist to escape his boring life, if only for a while. What isn’t as apparent is what an average man has to offer this woman. When that woman was Born Sexy Yesterday, he doesn’t need to have any special qualities. The women in such stories are so impressed by the modern world and the protagonist’s very ability to merely exist in it, that she is smitten with (and grateful to) him.

While Nanako and Senko’s relationship is more sexually complicated than the usual Born Sexy Yesterday couple, this trope is in full effect. Nanako’s knowledge of how simple things like a Roku or a supermarket work are more than enough to impress Senko. This goes back to what I said in my first review of the series. Since the things that Senko does for Nanako can never be repaid (she is his live-in cook and maid), Senko doesn’t even have to try. This new extension of that posits that Nanako pays Senko back with his incidental knowledge of the modern world. It’s actually pretty insidious when you think about it too long.

There are other issues with the episode. Its bifurcated structure is hardly motivated and Koenji’s absence in the back half makes that story drag, but when compared to the Born Sexy Yesterday business, that is small potatoes. It’s hard not to grade The Helpful Fox Senko-San on a curve when it decides to be more subtle about how gross it is because one has to pay much more attention to keep track of the skeevy and retrograde things it’s doing. That said, this still is a much better episode than either of its predecessors, so that will not go unnoticed.

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