Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls, Episode 1.07: Eggman vs. Sonic with the Sega Hard Girls

Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls, Episode 1.07: Eggman vs. Sonic with the Sega Hard Girls

Original Air Date: November 19th, 2014

In my previous review of an episode of "Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls," I got so busy ranting about the disturbing social and psychological underpinnings of this series, and the subgenre it is part of, that I overlooked an important part of the experience. See, the anime opening sequence is a proud tradition in Japan, flashy intros and a catchy theme song often being considered essential elements to a program's success. Unforgettable openings are valuable in American animation too but they often exist more as repetitive melodies that couldn't be mistaken for Top 40 hits, more commercial jingles than emotionally resonant works of art. Japanese cartoon makers, meanwhile, truly pioneered the idea of having professionally made pop or rock songs as their opening themes. These strong tunes are then paired with a dynamically edited series of images that are often better animated than the actual episode will be. A really good anime intro has you ready to Mazin-Go, leaves you-are-shocked, gets you to burning, puts your grasses on, and creates the Pegusu Fantusee even if you don't seem to understand what the fuck a Head Cha-La is. It's as much a statement of purpose as it is an eye-catching, ear-worming blend of music and visuals. 

In other words, a good anime OP delivers, sometimes being the difference between a generation spanning hit and a forgettable also-ran. How does the "Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls'" intro stack up? It gives the impression that this is a show meant to blind the viewer with a rocket-paced swirl of bright colors, cutesy cartoon imagery, and ear-piercing sounds. After a brief Genesis style start screen, the viewer is assaulted with an escalating, hectic dance beat, high-pitched anime girls shouting “HAI!,” and a visual vortex of bright colors and Sega consoles. Frantic dance moves and clips from classic games follow, with more extremely bright colors, more squeaky shouts, and a techno beat that simply never stops hammering into your skull. It is the audio/visual equivalent of swallowing six Pixie Stix and then getting slammed in the head with baseballs flung at high speed. The kind of assaultive, hyper-active sugar rush that makes me feel like I just lost a fight. 

In some ways, it is a fitting opening for a show like this. After being teased at the end of the last episode, Sonic and Eggman take center stage in the aptly named “Eggman vs. Sonic with the Sega Hard Girls” and it is as inanely plotted and obnoxious as the previous installment. Eggman hacking into the “Border Break” world has, for whatever reason, caused the three SeHa Girls to shrink to small size and revert to their “chibi” forms. Sonic shows up and protects the girls from Eggman and his legion of automated turrets. Soon, Sonic pursues his enemy across a montage of famous stages and scenes from his various video games. The SeHa Girls hitch a ride on the hedgehog's quills, taking a wild journey before returning to the “Border Break” world, where Sonic drives his opponent away for the time being. The wacky incidents that follow also finish up the quest Center-sensai sent the girls to this world to in the first place. 

When I was informed that Sonic the Hedgehog crossed over with some weird anime created to promote Sega's library of games, I expected him to... Ya know, talk. To act like Sonic in more than merely the sense of running around and fighting robots. No such luck. The hedgehog, as presented here, resembles his “Sonic Adventure” appearance. Despite that, not a single word crosses his lips, as is tradition with “Classic” Sonic by this point. Eggman is totally silent as well, flashing a crazy smile from his Egg-Mobile. That Sega's most beloved franchise (internationally anyway) shows up in this cartoon without saying anything goes a long way towards explaining the philosophy of “SeHa Girls.” That the I.P.s are present and represented is more important to the program than them actually doing anything of note or showing a genuine personality. 

Which isn't to say that “Eggman vs. Sonic with the Sega Hard Girls” isn't clearly meant to be a celebration of the “Sonic the Hedgehog” brand. We do get a mildly neat action sequence of Sonic running along the sides of the canyon walls and destroying Eggman's machine guns. (Amusingly, he accomplishes this by jumping on top of them.) However, Sonic soon pursues Eggman through some inverted inter-dimensional wedgie. This results in a montage of scenes from previous “Sonic” games. I don't mean we see Sonic chasing Eggman through stages and hazards we all know and love. Instead, the episode literally shows gameplay footage from “Sonic 1's” Green Hill Zone and Special Stage, as well as the famous orca chase from “Sonic Adventure.” The SeHa Girls appear in bubbles to comment on what is happening but that's about the only difference from these moments and zones we've all played a hundred times.

I suppose it would be useful to remember that “SeHa Girls” was, obviously, a very low-budget TV show. At the same time, I didn't expect it to reuse quite so much pre-existing footage. Despite the clear lack of effort expended on this extended tribute to Sonic the Hedgehog, the script certainly never lets you forget who the real star of the show is. From the moment the blue hero appears, all the SeHa Girls' dialogue is devoted to exalting how great he is. The titular trio spends nearly the entire eleven minute runtime of the episode talking about how much they love Sonic and how fantastic they think he is. Listen, you could say I'm a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog. He might be a character that I enjoy. Yet an episode of television – especially one he's ostensibly only guest starring in – stopping dead in its tracks to remind us how fucking awesome Sega's corporate mascot is not an ideal way to tell a narrative.

In execution, this does not come off as a loving tribute to Sonic and his long history as a franchise. In fact, this feels a lot closer like an ego-stroking session for Sega as a corporate entity. Which, it should be all too apparent, it exactly is. “SeHa Girls” is a TV show literally about the video game consoles the company is famous for making, as personified by three cutesy CGI anime chicks. Every episode has them stepping into a new Sega video game. The final minutes of this episode hints that the mysterious Center-sensai, directing the girls, is actually Yuji Naka himself. (He provides the voice too, though under a heavily digitalized filter.) In other words: This is not an episode of a television show. It is a long commercial for Sega as a company, the products they produce, and how fucking amazing and great you should find all of the above. Am I watching a story or being sold something? 

A television show being designed to sell you something, existing to be nothing more than an extension of a cooperate commercial agenda, is one thing. I like “Beast Wars,” “The LEGO Movie,” “Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers,” and numerous other movies and shows made with this purpose in mind. If “Eggman Versus Sonic and the SeHa Girls” managed to do a better job of disguising its status as an advertisement, I still would not be able to overlook an important fact: I hate the SeHa Girls. I really don't like them. I cannot sanction their buffoonery. The CGI models continue to be as shallowly defined as possible. Dreamcast's clumsy antics remain unbearable. Mega Drive is simply the smart one and Saturn has no personality at all. They spend the whole episode as tiny gremlins with enormous heads, fawning over Sonic and shrieking in a variety of situations. 

It's fair to say that “SeHa Girls” is simply not the kind of humor that appeals to me. What are the jokes here? Dreamcast stumbles into the enemy core in the “Border Break” world, her physical clumsiness once again causing her to sail head first into an object. After the entire ordeal is over, Center-sensai forgets what deal he made with the SeHa Girls, as far as their rewards go. Naturally, the girls respond with loud, vocal bafflement. That's truly about it though! How is this presentation meant to amuse us? Are we simply suppose to feel a dopamine hit from the cute girls shrieking or seeing references made to video games that we recognize? If that's the case, “SeHa Girls” is a truest example I can think of a TV show jingling keys in front of its viewers' faces. Bright colors, loud noises, easy nostalgia, cutesy faces: Truly dire stuff. 

The “Sega Hard Girls” multimedia project was, I suppose by any traditional measure, a success. The light novels wrapped up by June of 2014 but the manga kept running until February of 2015. The anime's thirteen episode run concluded in December of 2014 but was apparently popular enough to spawn an OVA two years later, in 2016. That is, not coincidentally, the same year a video game that crossed the Sega Hard Girls over with the “Hyderdimension Neptunia” series came out. That includes a North American release too. That game got re-released for Steam the next year and that is, as far as I can tell, the last anyone has heard of this particular franchise. Not a bad run but, at the same time, it does not seem to me that “SeHa Girls” is an especially beloved or well-remembered endeavor. I'm sure Sonic has cameos or split-second appearances in some of the later episodes of “Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls” or the other branches of the project. As the primary mascot for the company this whole thing is meant to be fluffing, that's inevitable. However, I don't think I'm strong enough to seek those installments out. Needless to say, “SeHa Girls” is definitively not for me. I prefer a cartoon with characters that have genuine personalities and exist for a reason beyond shilling old video games and overpriced statues of waifus... [5/10]

Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls, Episode 1.06: Center-sensei's Center Exam

Hi-sCoool! SeHa Girls, Episode 1.06: Center-sensei's Center Exam

Original Air Date: November 12, 2014

I think I've mentioned this before but Japan, as a culture, seems rather fixated on the idea of the mascot. Here in God's country, mascots are only associated with those lowest forms of entertainment: School sports, breakfast cereals, fast food restaurants, disingenuous anti-drug/crime/gun safety organizations. Basically, the kind of otherwise boring shit corporations want to trick six-year-olds into liking. In Japan, however, all sorts of stuff have colorful cartoon mascots. Big cities, small towns, organizations, or companies are encouraged to create a mascot to further promotion, identify their core values, and endear themselves to the public at large. This practice is called "yuru-chara" – short for "yurui mascot character," in which "yurui" is best translated as "light-hearted" – and has been embraced by everything from massive companies to tiny local initiatives. These mascots are often characterized by their overwhelmingly cute and simplified designs, often all the more apparent in the large costume suits – known as "kigurumi" in Japan – that appear at events and gatherings. Some of these mascots have become so popular in their own right that their link to whatever they were originally made to promote – Hello Kitty for the Sanrio corporation, Domo-Kun for the NHK television network, Chiitan for the city of Susaki – becomes hazy, the characters becoming a brand in their own right. To American readers, this is like if Smokey Bear became so internationally beloved that you could buy everything from slippers to vibrators featuring his likeness. Or if Dig 'Em Frog was so popular that you could be a lifelong fan of the character and have ton of his merch without once being within mouth's reach of a bowl of Honey Smacks. 

Japan's all-abiding fascination with mascots is largely a result of the country's embrace of kawaii as an aesthetic philosophy. This has, unsurprisingly, crossbred with more hardcore nerd circles in order to create the spin-off concept of moé anthropomorphism. This is when the link between the mascot and whatever product or concept it is promoting is tossed out, the very thing itself becoming the character. If you love your favorite open-to-the-public-to-edit online encyclopedia so much that you want to marry it, there's now a cute anime girl version with which you can live out that disturbing fantasy! Being so closely linked to otaku culture, moé anthropomorphism crossed over into video games, anime, light novels, and manga very quickly. Essentially, if you are a fan of a type of thing, there's probably a cute Japanese cartoon girl version of it out there that you can imagine vivid erotic scenarios about, if not an entire animated series or gaming franchise devoted to a whole horde of them. World War II battle ships? Animals? Countries? The cells that make up your very body? Pandemics that devastate the global population? Yep, yep, yep, yep, and yep. Is there a manga out there in which the rivalry between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's schools of psychotherapy is symbolized as a love-hate relationship between two big titty waifus? If not, I call dibs on that one. 

Being an ultra-nerdy conclave within already super-dorky fandoms, it should be unsurprising that gaming related phenomenon has spawned quite a lot of moé anthropomorphism media. There's a fantasy series reimagining the Nintendo/Sega console wars of the nineties as a Tolkienian epic. The extremely popular "Hyperdimension Neptunia" series does something similar within the JRPG genre, turning every gaming console you can think of into provocatively dressed, suspiciously young looking "digital goddesses" with enormous eyes. Yes, this process, of re-imagining objects you can buy as cutesy 2D babes, has also crossbred with Japan's idol culture. You can show your fidelity to Sega products by decorating your home with figures, posters, and shrines to a cutesy personification of your beloved console. This feels like the end game of capitalism, doesn't it? The product itself becoming an object of desire or literal worship for the individual, people willingly creating a creepy parasocial relationship not with a public figure but a sexualized personification of their favorite possession. Marx would have an aneurysm if he lived to see this. 

Anyway, I bring all of this up on my stupid "Sonic the Hedgehog" blog for a reason. In 2013, some mad scientist deep within a Japanese publishing company came up with a light novel series in which Sega's various game consoles are reimagined as kawaii anime girls that go on wacky adventures together. This quickly led to a manga, which soon beget video games and an anime adaptation. The umbrella term for the entire brand is "Sega Hard Girls." The title refers to the difficulty of the referenced video games but I'm betting a double entendre – what might these anime girls in short skirts and thigh-highs do to your pants, UwU – was intentional. Which might explain why the series is usually abbreviated to "SeHa Girls." Following another common trend in anime storytelling, most of the installments in the series depict the various consoles/girls as students at a high school. 

TMS Entertainment would follow that template with "Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls," a 2014 CGI anime series with an extremely annoying-to-type name. The series follows three of the SeHa Girls: The ditzy but well intentioned Dreamcast, the studious and withdrawn meganekko Mega Drive, and Saturn, who is apparently the sexy one despite showing the same amount of skin as the other two. Their goal is to graduate Sehagaga Academy. They do this under the cruel tutelage of Center-sensai, a computer program with a rabbit avatar. He gives the girls tasks which take them inside the worlds of various beloved and not-so-beloved Sega properties. In other words, this entire venture is an excuse to promote the popular I.P.s Sega owns as well as turn their consoles into cute girls you can adore and/or lust after. The cartoon focuses on the central trio mentioned above but the other branches of the project takes the gag as far as possible, featuring moé versions of the Sega CD, the 32X, the SG-1000, and the fuckin' DreamCast memory cards too. That the series doesn't feature waifus based on the various incarnations of the Sega Pico feels like a massive oversight but perhaps someone decided sexualizing consoles for preschoolers was too far even for the Japanese. 

Entire episodes of "SeHa Girls" take place in the worlds of "Virtua Fighters," "Space Channel 5," "Puyo Puyo," "Jet Set Radio," "Space Harrier," "Hang-On," and some fucking cell phone game. Notable shout-outs to "Golden Axe," "Altered Beasts," "Sakura Wars," "Phantasy Star," "Congo Bongo," and "Fantasy Zone" pop up. That weird beetle fighting game, where you scanned physical trading cards at arcade cabinets, is a running joke. Obviously, for a series so entrenched in Sega lore, it was only a matter of time before the company's beloved blue hedgehog showed up. Aside from cameos in the opening and closing credits, Sonic appeared in the sixth and seventh episodes of "SeHa Girls." Which finally brings me to the reason I'm talking about this particular obscure Japanese cartoon show, whose premise is so fuckin' dumb and dependent on cultural context that it required six paragraphs of preamble to set it up.

Sonic and Eggman actually only have cameos at the very end of episode six, the two characters appearing suddenly to set up the next installment. However, I'm the thorough sort so I'm covering both halves. "Center-sensei's Center Exam" focuses mostly on "Border Break," a co-op arcade shooter starring giant robots with simple "capture the flag" game play. (I've never heard of it but apparently it was popular in Japan.) The girls are sent into the game's world to collect the stars they need to pass their exam. Dreamcast and Mega Drive get enormous mecha to pilot while Saturn is forced to get around on her own. Shenanigans ensue, mostly because of Dreamcast being kind of an idiot. As the three are finally about to claim the enemy team's flag, Center-sensai appears to announce that their system has been hacked. The culprit? Dokutā Egguman! Luckily, Sonikku quickly appears to assist the fight. 

I actually first heard about "SeHa Girls" years ago thanks to the Anime World Order podcast reviewing it. Despite a lot of blatant anti-Sonic rhetoric in that review, the otherwise knowledgeable hosts had positive things to say about this program. Perhaps that set my expectations too high for what is described by multiple sources as a gag anime. Because this shit is dumb, y'all. A lot of the humor is extremely broad physical comedy, built mostly on the girls doing stuff by accident. Dreamcast's ditziness is the source of a repeating gag, where she keeps accidentally shooting at Saturn. It would seem this show is pitched right at the kind of fans who find high-pitched anime girls shrieking at each other and being involved in pedestrian slapstick inherently hilarious. It did not make me laugh! Is it possible that Daryl Surat doesn't actually know what he's been talking about all these years??? 

The truth is, this episode of "Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls" didn't make me feel much of anything. That the series is animated with CGI, and largely takes place within a video game, it makes me feel like I'm watching one of those old Machinima animations. It's not ugly, as so many CGI anime are, but it's also not especially distinctive. Honestly, considering the entire point of this series is to turn the Sega consoles into anime waifus you can buy merchandise of, I'm surprised at how uninteresting the SeHa Girls' designs are. They don't incorporate nearly enough of the console's color schemes or features into their appearances. Dreamcast has a big controller as a crown, the orange spiral and the triangle on her chest, and stockings vaguely reminiscent of the system's controllers. Saturn and Mega Drive are not that distinct, with an easily missed hairclip or a symbol on some boots being the main giveaways as to what consoles they are meant to represent. 

Instead of drawing obvious inspiration from their source material, they look like generic moé blobs to me. They have colorful hair, enormous glittery eyes, costumes that are distinct enough to cosplay but not so elaborate as to be difficult to make. Despite the weird, objectifying element inherent in this entire enterprise, the girls don't strike me as especially sexualized either. The SeHa Girls are not the big titty anime GFs you might be expecting. They exist in that obnoxious J-pop idol realm of sexuality: Cute, a little teasing of their feminine attributes, but never too forward or provocative. This is essential to the moé girls' appeal. Their kawaii purity must never be violated, least the otakus at home find themselves unable to imagine each character as his personal dream girl, an attractive but forever youthful and virginal digital girlfriend that can never reject him like real girls, with their depth and complex human personalities, can. 

In other words... The SeHa Girls, and all the other comparable anime characters, can never be allowed to be anything more than archetypes. They do not own their sexuality. That belongs to the fan boys that will deify them. They can't have too defined of a personality, least it spoil the universal appeal these girls are meant to have. They are not fully fleshed-out living things but rather... Objects. Not unlike the game consoles they are named after and meant to represent, bringing the disturbingly sexist subtext of the entire moé anthropomorphism subgenre to the forefront. Thus, Dreamcast can never be more than a clumsy bimbo, despite being based on a the "thinking" console. Mega Drive is the quiet, nerdy bookworm that is too shy to participate in the dance number over the end credits. The kind of little sister type a hikinomori shut-in can dream of protecting and cherishing. Based on this one episode, Saturn doesn't seem to have much of a personality at all. 

Man, I guess watching "Perfect Blue" and "Welcome to the N.H.K." didn't prepare me for how pandering anime aimed directly at the lonely fanboys can be. Not to mention how crushingly commercial it is, with this implicit subtext of "disregard humanity and embrace products instead." I want to be offended by the layers of sexism and capitalism woven through every part of this show but "Hi☆sCoool! SeHa Girls" truly isn't that distinctive. It's dumb, short, lame, and unimaginative and not worthy of any outrage. But, uh, hey, Sonic the Hedgehog and Robotnik sure do show up in the last two minutes! Hopefully the next one of these will provide more "Sonic" content for me to talk about. Otherwise, I am simply and clearly not the target audience for this program. [5/10]