The Hanaukyo Maid Diaries
~by Chiriko

Disclaimer: I only plan on watching this shit once. I am typing as I go along, because I refuse to subject myself to more of this horrible crap.

A bit of poking around on the forums will indeed show that our members have varying tastes and preferred styles both inside and outside the animation world, and have, perhaps had more experience on the FuKu side of things than they would prefer. As such, they often recommend to me shows that, through some horrible misfortune or another, they have managed to catch a glimpse of through some FuKu osmosis or review (or perhaps a randomly suggested download to them by a particularly horrible person). I was assured by one such FuKuteer (our old friend Hamster, I believe) that were I to stomach Hanaukyo Maids (alternate titles: Maid in Hanaukyo, Hanaukyo Maid-tai), I would have forever found the ultimate in incredibly nauseating stupid chauvinistic harem-fantasy fanservice ani-shit. Boy, was she ever wrong; this show is far worse than that.

Hanaukyo Maids follows the adventures of some stupid whiny shota-brat named Hanaukyo Tarou who has come to his grandfather's house after the death of his mother. After searching to find the extremely large mansion, he is greeted by a stampede of obnoxious fanservice maids, the first of which gives him a deep and extremely disturbing tongue-kiss.

Flash forward to the opening theme, singing about "serving you with all our love." It just ended, and I'm positively horrified. This is quite possibly the worst show of any media I have ever seen in my entire life. I knew this shit would be bad, but ye gods! This primordial ooze has no place in the world of civilized people.

I wish I could say I was taking this picture out of context.

*sigh* What traces of journalistic integrity I have require that I continue. The first scene of the movie reveals that the boy's grandfather has left him a film (filled with more shots of the naked breast in two minutes than in all of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, but without any legitimate artistic purpose) explaining, supposedly, why the hot maid french-kissed him on his arrival. So, the kid finds out his grandfather has moved to Fanservice Island and therefore the entire mansion is his, with his immense staff of "maids" (read: slaves who derive nothing but pure pleasure from serving their dear male master) and all his assets. Oh, god, I knew this was going to be bad, but I never knew it would be this god-awful.

So, then, the kid goes to the bathroom to take a piss, and three attractive maids unzip his pants and insist that their old master made them do this. So, the kid is struggling with them, screams "deru! deru zo!" which is um... bad. =P Trust me on that one. At any rate, he pisses himself and then has an argument with them over whether they can remove/change his clothes or not. So, to recap, you have twentysomething maids poking around and giving themselves to complete sexual and literal servitude to a sixth-grader who doesn't even want it. Isn't that called "statutory rape" in the Real World?

It gets worse. Far, far worse. He goes to the private hot spring at the mansion and expresses how nice it is to finally be alone. (OH NO! I THINK I KNOW WHERE THIS IS GOING!!! =P) Minute nine of this crap and the shota-boy is HAVING HIMSELF WASHED BY THE LATHERED BREASTS OF A HUNDRED NAKED MAIDS!!!

The boy passes out or something and wakes up in the lap of Mariel, the only maid he has a boner for (or, in my opinion, a mother-complex... *shudder*). In this telling scene, he reveals that he's not really sure whether he likes this or not. Which essentially shows the most chilling fact of all; he's not against being served in every way by a harem of live-in sex-slaves in maid costumes on any sort of "women are people" grounds, he's just a big fucking pussy and that's why this makes him uncomfortable. It's as if every character in Tenchi Muyo went out of their way to blow Tenchi and wash him with their breasts, except Tenchi would have to be in sixth grade. Damn this show!!!!! Predictably, as Mariel leaves him to go to bed, three adult women hop into bed with him and insist on "pleasing him for the final time of the day." The lights go dark. The holocaust is complete.

...Or so you'd think! No, the ending theme features three incredibly ugly Japanese women in maid costumes!

At the start of the second episode, before the abominable credits even begin to roll, three maids hop into bed with Tarou and fellate him to consciousness. I am not even joking. You don't actually SEE the cock being sucked, but there is absolutely NO way this scene means anything else. Don't give me those innocent slapstick gestures and tell me three adult women weren't just fellating an underage boy to climax, otaku. There are no other possibilities! This scene is unambiguous! Oh god, I think the second episode will be the end of me.

Now the kid is going to school in a helicopter. (I'm counting the seconds before something stupid happens.) After exactly 37 seconds of actual dialogue (a new record!!!) we see that the back is filled with maids in seifuku ready to serve him at school as well. Hoo boy. Then Mariel attaches another flimsy attempt at plot to this stupid show by saying that any maids who don't do their work have to be laid off. We see one of the whiny maids being fired and having to take a sleazy life as a porn star in Tarou's fantasy, so of course he can't fire them.

He gets surrounded by the maid schoolgirls in his new class (how suspicious), and then the teacher calls him up to the front of the class to do a math problem. Rather than exercise his knowledge of the quadratic formula, he's about to piss himself, so the maids do something implausible to scribble the right answers on the board, which gets his teacher gushing over him. So, let's review: the kid is misogynistic, annoying, whiny, and stupid.

Add "bad at sports" to that list and you have the next fucking section of this crime against humanity. The maids-cum-students chat up with the real high school girls about how cool that new boy is (but not without a gratuitous locker room scene), at which point the show crosses over from disturbingly insane to repulsively insane. The maids use an implausible rope-and-pulley system to help him be the basketball star so that all the high school girls will want to sleep with him.

The third episode (already featuring more undocumented stupidity) gives us the introduction of the  incredibly stupid frilly shirt of the rich kid and the lolicon maid. Thank god. I was about to say "man, there just isn't enough pedophilia in this show!" Glad they gave me an eight-year-old girl too. Then we meet the inventor girl that Tarou pictured being a porn star earlier. Turns out she's a scientific genius who invents incredible life-changing devices. And she's working as a sex slave to a brat. Oh, guess what? She also loves anime. So you have a brilliant but subservient hot girl with glasses who loves anime. I apologize to the creators of Love Hina and I My Me Strawberry Eggs for calling their programs "purely unforgivable fanservice with no redeeming story whatsoever." Which those programs are. But there's no way to emphasize exactly how horrible this show is. Love Hina has the character depth, directional expertise, and fascinating story of Cowboy Bebop or Boogiepop when compared with this fucking god-awful show.

Oh, got off on a bit of a tangent there. Third episode. Well, basically, the nerd maid builds a machine to change the weather that blows up and destroys the house, but Tarou saves everyone. Their lives are in jeopardy, but thankfully there is still time for some stupid panty shots. As if to reward the viewer for having to sit through what (although incredibly stupid) was actually a story instead of gratuitous plotless fanservice, the end of this episode features mysteriously (and unexplained) dissolving clothes (yes, even on the little girl, though she's wearing a slip underneath) and a sudden snowstorm as the house explodes, followed by a topless snowball fight.

That's right. A topless snowball fight. My horror knows no limits.

The fourth episode attempts to establish even more story to this stupid crap by introducing the rival of the House of Hanaukyo, the heiress to some other stupid rich family. She has a staff of attractive males wearing open shirts. She comes and bitches at Tarou about somethingorother, then he accidentally hits her with a giant steel girder on the forehead, and she bleeds fountains of blood all over the place. Blood is literally spurting from her forehead. Then the nerdy maid finds and disassembles her blimp for materials, and the three fellatio maids show up again demanding their turn at giving him "service." Did I mention this is the worst show I've ever seen?

Let me assure each and every one of my readers right here and right now that this is not a show any sane Japanese person would watch, just as it is not a show any sane non-Japanese person would watch. The creators are otaku. The target market is otaku. Hell, even the characters are otaku. And in that way, this show is far more deranged than anything "otakish" that might have a slight chance of making its way to the semi-mainstream (like Love Hina). This show is a sexist realization of complete and unabashed male-dominance fantasy. In otherwords, Hanaukyo Maids is pure fucking unabashed pornography, but without any of the sex scenes. Now, why would you want to watch, own, or collect crap related to a show that was pornography masquerading as a mainstream program? This is far more dangerous and disturbing than actual pornography, because we know actual porn's function. You expect pornography (anime or real-life) to be really bad; you expect explicit sex. You know damn well that that's the point, and that's why porn is enjoyable to many people on an ironic (it's fucking stupid and funny) and unironic (people are, after all, fucking) way. Hanaukyo Maids fails to be funny or enjoyable on either one of these levels; I can't understand why the otaku who masturbates to La Blue Girl and Urotsukidoji would enjoy this.

To put it bluntly: This show has no redeeming qualities for any aspect of any society, and I mean that from the bottom of my heart. It is a despicable, lamentable, and laughable attempt at creating a plausible form of media-based entertainment from a sexual fantasy and an unrealistic approach towards the opposite sex. More disturbingly, though, it is pornography masquerading as legitimate theater; it is one step short of actual pornography and five or six steps too far beyond stupid fanservice crap. And while it is certainly not the only show that is not-quite-explicit enough to be porn but also not quite interesting or story-driven enough to be, well, enjoyable (think Demon Hunter Yoko), it is by far the absolute worst of its kind.

I do not joke when I say this, as I often do; this time, I mean what I say from the bottom of the depths of what was once my heart but is now a pit fillled with inhuman rage and contempt for all mankind as a result of sitting through four episodes of Hanaukyo Maids: This is the worst show of any film-based media, anime or otherwise, that I have ever seen in my life.

In searching for other opinions and information on this show in the wonderful garden of the internet I have come across sites which have given this show good ratings, proudly advertising it as a legitimate, if not slightly "ecchi," anime. The average user-rating of this show at animenfo.com, for example, was 7.2/10, averaged from 84 reviews.

I have invented a rating system (a concept I initially shied away from for this site) to be applied to all of the reviews done thus far on this website (check the other reviews for newly-added ratings), just so I can express how completely abominable this show is in a numeric format, just to drive the point home one last time. To fully emphasize how horrible this show is, I am allowing for negative scores despite this being a positive-integer based system.