Common Name: Grand Blue
Score: 6/10, 3/5
Length: 12 Episodes
Genre: Comedy, Slice of Life, School Life, Romance
Summary: Having just moved from his hometown to the seaside town of Izu, Kitahara Iori is pumped to get his college dream life underway. He's got a place to live, thanks to his uncle who owns the diving shop, Grand Blue. He's already got friends he can rely on in his beautiful cousins, Chisa and Nanaka Kotegawa. No sooner does he arrive, though, and Iori is dragged kicking and screaming into the murk of Izu University's fraternity scene. In no time flat, the muscle heads of Peek-a-Boo, a scuba enthusiast frat, have got Iori dancing to their tune of heavy drinking, shameless nudity, and lots of schemes to drag new people into club's insane activities, a fact that bothers Chisa to no small degree.
Review: Over the course of my writing reviews I've dealt with many different shades of disliking and outright hatred for shows that just push my buttons in one way or another. While many of these shades overlap or are grounded in the same reasoning, I think this is the first title I've ever run into that I like and dislike for the exact same reasons. On the one hand, Grand Blue is a fairly humorous comedy about frat mentality and how easy it is to fall into groupthink when you're trying to fit in somewhere. On the other, I outright despise frat culture, frat boys, and all the legitimately harmful hijinx these kinds of groups get up to for the sake of amusement. Particularly in today's political climate and in light of recent events, it's not hard to hate on this show and its characters. Yet, for some reason, I won't deny that I get some kind of sick catharsis out of watching these morons potentially ruin their futures for the sake of "living it up." So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm treading new ground with this review which means you'll likely see a lot more bias on my part, a lot of contradictory thoughts, and plenty of me flip-flopping between like and dislike because, quite frankly, I'm still not really sure where my feelings toward this show ultimately fall.
Though just trying to recall it is making me sway in one particular direction. Care to guess which one it is?
Before I delve into opinions, though, it might be better to start things off objectively and then build up from there so you at least understand why I'm even remotely conflicted about this show. On the whole, Grand Blue functions as a humorously offensive comedy in much the same vein as Prison School. Both it's main character, Kitahara Iroi, and the majority of its cast are presented as these brash, self-centered, mean-spirited, and absurdly thirsty meatheads that are about as shallow as a beer can. While that might sound like an opinion on my part, the show goes well out of its way to prove this fact. From the word go, Iori is forcibly drafted, against his will, into a fraternity of heavy drinking nudists who have made Iori's new home their home base. Though he starts off reluctant at first and occasionally has moments where his sanity leaked through the crazy, it's not long before Iori becomes the personification of this frat's particular brand of groupthink. The simple fact that one of his first acts as a new member is to underhandedly force yet another unsuspecting freshman into the ranks just to save his own ass makes that point pretty clear. Yet, believe it or not, the insanity just grows from there as Iori's victim, an otaku named Imamura Kouhei, quickly becomes Iori's best frienemy and comedic double, albeit one that will throw Iori under any and every bus he can find.
Yup, the best of friends these two.
Beyond these two and their brand of cringy comedy, nearly every character has something to offer the show that follows the general theme of everyone being a terrible person. For instance, all the other male characters of the series, minus the leaders of Iori's frat, can simply be described as a unified mob against individual happiness. When one character, usually Iori, has any kind of luck with the few women that attend their university, the entire rest of the school bands together to ruin that relationship before it has a chance to go anywhere. The only notable exception to this rule in Iori's case is his "relationship" with his cousin and primary love interest, Kotegawa Chisa; though, admittedly, Iori did have to spill some blood before the guys eventually laid off. Coincidentally, this particular bit brings us to the issues with the female cast members.
In all honesty, though, my issues with the female cast can be restricted to one in particular.
While they're not nearly as comedically central to the show as the guys, the girls of this show aren't all that much better personality-wise. In essence, all they have to offer is the fact that they are all beautiful/cute in the most objective sense possible and that they occasionally join the "Let's Ruin Iori's Life Club." Chisa's character, in particular, is the exemplar of this idea. As the main love interest for Iori, she generally fluctuates between being either a spiteful tsundere or, and I don't use these words lightly, an absolute bitch. There are a few moments throughout the show where she treats Iori like a fellow human being and acts weirdly coy about her blatantly obvious crush on him. It is, however, relatively safe to say that she spends the vast majority of the show treating him like walking, talking fecal matter and throwing him into situations that put his life in danger, thanks to the aforementioned mob against individual happiness. Along with Chisa, there are also a few other girls to consider. First among these is Chisa's older sister, Nanako, who is generally defined by both her motherly figure and personality as well as her less-than-wholesome obsession with her sister. Second is the character of Hamaoka Azusa, who basically amounts to being yet another heavy drinking leader of the fraternity and a character that derives great joy at watching other people embarrass themselves after a few drinks. Lastly, due to her being the least offensive of the lot, is Yoshiwara Aina, a freshman girl who gets roped into the Peek-A-Boo fraternity about halfway through the series. On the whole, there's little to complain about with Aina, since she tends to function as the show's third perspective character, next to Iori and Kouhei, and the more modest voice of reason for the group. If there's one complaint to level against her, though, it's that she also gets relegated to the status as Chisa as a potential love interest for Iori, effectively making her just a conglomeration of all the characters.
By the show's end, it's pretty clear that she's not too far from being
yet another victim of Peek-A-Boo's groupthink.
So, with such a large cast of characters who all have a certain brand of comedy to bring to the show, you'd think that Grand Blue would just be non-stop laughs, right? Unfortunately, not so much. Frankly, the show's comedy is actually pretty limited and just comes across as needlessly hateful as everything always tends to boil down to making Iori's life an absolute nightmare. In point of fact, the main structure of every episode can be boiled down to just a few specific gags. For starters, there's the general joke that Iori and Kouhei are constantly being roped into drinking to the point of blacking out whenever they're in contact with Peek-A-Boo's leaders. Then there's the joke about how terrible and shameless it is that Iori's gotten used to just never wearing clothes followed immediately by Chisa either glaring daggers or vocally putting Iori down for getting roped into the frat she's also a part of. Then there's the joke of Iori landing in a shit situation that he has to drag Kouhei into, what with them being friends and all, just to have it bite him in the ass regardless. Then, last but not least, there's the joke of Iori joining the guys in some escapade to get their dicks wet only for everyone to end up just as unsexed as they were when they started.
Oh yeah, before I forget, there's also the running gag that Iori and Kouhei are gay.
So, in other words, this show's entire comedy is about everyone being a shitass to Iori and him rapidly losing what little sanity he possessed from the beginning. Now, sure, this kind of cathartic comedy against a reluctant frat boy can be funny at times but, since that's all this show really has to offer comedically, it's not hard to see how it can grow stale really fast. What's particularly disappointing, though, is that it's also not hard to see where the actual quality in this show lies. Littered throughout the show, there are little scraps of moments where we can see the characters acting like reasonable human beings. Rather than just shitting on each other and everyone around them, there are a few quieter moments where we see various members of the cast turn into actually compelling people. The moment Iori and Kouhei decided to team up to make fools of the tennis club members that treated Aina like shit just to make her feel better about herself is a fantastic example of that. Another is when Iori gets a quiet moment with Azusa and they just kinda talk through their feelings for each other and everyone else in their group and then ending with Iori turning down her advances out of respect for their friendship. There are little gems like these that dot the series and effectively humanize the characters in a really effective manner only to have any and all respect for them shatter the second that comedic groupthink kicks back in.
Christ, it's like they're all allergic to kindness and goodwill or something.
I think what galls me the most about this show is that I can see what it's going for, but am ultimately left with this mess of a show that was either too scatterbrained or too cowardly to see that idea through to the end. As a whole, Grand Blue, offers a fairly engaging and accurate portrayal of fraternity culture, albeit one that relies on a healthy dose of absurdist logic. Throughout the series, we see the dangers of groupthink and peer pressure fully on display. We get a running gag on the cyclical cruelty of sabotaging another person's happiness roll on and on until it's clear no one will ever be happy unless the cycle ends. Yet, beneath all that, we see these asinine weirdos show their humanity once all that posturing and bullshit break down. When all is said and done, its fairly clear how this show was meant to be about a bunch of misfits that built a community founded on kinship and respect for one another. Yet that idea hardly comes across at all since the show seems far more enamored with its own comedy and the absurd levels of spite and hate that fuel every interaction.
Maybe I just have unreasonable standards in friends, but the minute someone even considers
selling me out to a lynch mob that friendship is fucking done.
So, on the one hand, I hate this show with every fiber of my being. All it did was reaffirm just how much I dislike this kind of self-destructive culture that fraternities thrive on. Yet, at the same time, I love it for mocking that culture and its rare moments of real, human interaction and emotion. You know what they say though: If wishes were fishes, this would have been the scuba anime it initially promoted itself as. In any case, I'm once again left at this weird crossroads of not really knowing if it's worth the recommendation or not. So, clearly, this just isn't going to be a show for everyone. If the idea of watching frat boys Looney Toons it up as frat boys sounds interesting, then this'll be right up your alley. If all the bullshit I just talked about at length just sounds like offensive garbage, avoid it at all cost. If you're on the fence like I am, then I guess you could do worse.