Nice hat.

Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata (Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend) is an anime adaptation of an ongoing series of light novels about a group of high school kids developing a visual novel game for Comiket. It's a harem comedy and relies heavily on tropes and common character archetypes. Tomoya is an unapologetic otaku clad in birth-control glasses. His tsundere childhood friend is hopelessly in love with him, but naturally he's completely oblivious. Since she is in a harem comedy, Eriri has plenty of competition from more aerodynamic rivals who offer Potato-kun the green light early and often. Really, the only reason the "YES" embroidery on his bedroom pillow isn't completely worn down is due to the preservative powers of the Otaku Virtues. The damn shit's better than Woolite.

The face of a Best Girl trapped in a harem comedy with a loathsome protagonist.

Despite some very questionable components, I liked the first season of Saekano a decent amount. Unfortunately, its Saenai Heroine no Sodate-kata♭ sequel (How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend Flat) isn't working for me. All of the problems I have with the show were present during the first season, but either the execution was better or I was simply more willing to accept its shortcomings, something I acknowledged when I blogged about it. Ultimately, it's Potato-kun being a shitbag and the show's proselytization of the Otaku Virtues that kill my enthusiasm for Saekano Flat. These are the sort of bits that can sort of work from a meta perspective when lightly used, but the heavier a show relies on these tropes, the less meta it feels and the more bona fide it becomes. And then you just end up with regular ol' tsundere bullshit and a harem comedy gravity well which pulls inversely proportional to its hold on reality.

I bet those boxes are empty.

What I'm left with is loathing for Potato-kun and open disdain for every other character on the show with the sole exception of Megumi, who has rocketed so far ahead in the show's Best Girl standings that she can almost assuredly boat race the rest of the competition from here on out. And this is nearly entirely a consequence of her (thus far, through six episodes and one pool-romp prologue) refusal to go along with Tomoya's high-intensity idiocy. That said, I'm still not quite as hostile to the show as these couple of paragraphs might suggest, so it's not as if I intend to drop it. I'm just disappointed Saekano Flat keeps tumbling into avoidable pitfalls. The show is unworthy of its animation and its Misaki Kurehito superlovely character designs. I guess it does deserve the glare of displeased long-hair Megumi, though.

Yeah, it's pretty red.

Before I get into it, I need to provide a bit of background. The lock screens of all my computers and mobile devices are pictures of whatever they happened to be named. For example, the lock screen of my old Android phone that I designated MIYU had a picture of its namesake from My-HiME. The laptop named Kaede has a picture of the corresponding Cinderella Girl on its lock screen. So, anyway, I recently bought a red Vaio laptop (probably because of Evangelion, to be honest). Vaio, if you haven't heard, isn't a Sony property anymore, although their computers are still made in Japan. And I can certainly see the lineage connecting this Vaio SX14 to the Sony Vaio Z2 (VPCZ2390X Model PCG-41313L) which I got in 2012.

Doesn't even bother using a mouse.

Anyway, you're probably here because of the post's clickbait title and wondering where the fuck the obscenity is. Well, I'm getting to that. If you've watched Saenai Heroine no Sodatekata, you may recall that Kasumigaoka Utaha bangs out her work on a red laptop (which survives quite a bit of abuse that no Vaio I've ever owned could possibly withstand, incidentally). Naturally, I've named my new red laptop Utaha. However, it's got a 4K display, and the lack of sufficiently satisfactory Utaha pictures at that resolution has led me to use a picture of her rival, Eriri, on its lock screen instead for the time being. I can understand if you're feeling sort of judgmental about this, but at least I'm willing to cop to it, okay.