🕑They say the average male thinks about IT a lot. Perhaps 6 out of every 10 seconds? Something like that. In ACS Horie Ao thinks about sex 8 out of every 10 seconds - how to /avoid/ it, that is.
"You wanna bang this out here?" AUGHHH! 😱
Wait, he's just talking about a study session. Whew.
"I don't see what the problem is about grinding it out here." Yeeeks!😬 The more she tenses up over her "worst fears," only to find that she read his innocent actions wrong, the more frustrated she becomes.😤 Frustrated people can't study!
Ao-chan Can't Study aka Midara na Ao-chan wa Benkyou ga Dekinai is a 2019 release that is rated 6.72 on MAL. It is 1 season consisting of 12 12-minute English dubbed episodes (+ 5 minutes of credits per episode).
📚Don't tell her she's got the "cool dad". She'd be horrified to hear that some of her classmates are fans. ACS follows the daughter of the neighborhood's House Of Lewd: Horie I-hate-all-men-including-the-ones-in-my-family Ao. There's no mistaking what her last name sounds like. Her response to her father's career as a writer of racey literature is to put everything she has into schoolwork and study. She is not an object❕ She believes all men have their minds in the gutter and are only interested in carnal desires. No thank you.
Kijima 💛 Takumi is a normie who finds he likes everything about Horie Ao. He wants to spend time with her and get to know her better. It's that simple. There are no ulterior motives, just the purest schoolboy crush.
Game on.
ACS is a romance, it's done competently, and it's cute. It's easy for the audience to root for this couple.
The animation supports and enhances the story perfectly. On a reality scale out of 10, it's a 5. People are drawn in hyper-fantasy/ Go BIG: big b👀bs, big eyes, big muscles, big colorful hair, big color-palette, and the backgrounds are minimized and stylized realism. Ao's father is drawn the size of a toddler, so we can't take him that seriously.
The show is very funny. Is Ao a virtue warrior or sexually frustrated? Yes, she is. She is no plaything, but that's red blood in her veins, and Kijima Takumi gets that blood flowing despite her protestations.
In all, it's a worthy love story and a fun diversion in exchange for little time spent on a few short episodes. There's a small blurb with test results after a run of short credits at the end of ep12. Don't tune out too soon.
〰🖍 IMHO
🎬80 📝75 🎭 80 💓78 🦋83 🌞75 🎨78 🎵/🔊74 😅78 😭0 😱0 😯20 😖0 🤔40 💤0 🔚85 /100
Age 16+ The tension between male-female relationships, love, physical expressions of love, and companionship is what this is about. A few moments into episode 1 we'll hear that if men see a hole they'll want to plug it. Some over-attention to cleavage and bouncing bosoms.
Rated G-for GCup. Just kidding❕ Rated TV-MA: Mature Audience Only, but the content is more PG-13/ R
Re-📺? Probably will
~~ Optional commentary ~~
More often than not, humor is based on serious and even tragic matters. Here's some after-thoughts:
ACS pokes fun at two things - the tension between pure physical desire vs pure love, and parent-child generational disconnect. Ao's father didn't want to restrict her, which is often borne in a parent from negative feelings about one's own parents' failures. There are no perfect parents, afterall. Kids need structure and boundaries to feel secure. Complete freedom made Ao feel insecure and alone. Her father was oblivious, so he was not putting in the effort to truly know his daughter and tailor his parenting style to meet her needs.
As for pure physical desire vs pure love, both are important. In fact, we are physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual beings. Every corner of our existence is important and each of them should provide pleasure as well as room for growth and self-improvement. The 20th century, for Western culture, was basically a long backlash against the Medieval-Victorian Era denial of physical pleasure. Like every generational cycle, by now we've taken it too far and have overlooked the importance of the other 3. (The USA, it seems at times, has practically become a $ex-cult). What we have sacrificed is intimacy. This is why kids should wait to jump in the sack. They haven't developed the emotional maturity for intimacy yet, and giving too much of oneself away too early will leave a person hollowed out. We see evidence of this everywhere.
From lite&trite to heavy&serious, here's some recs ~
Food Wars 8.2,
Maid Sama 10,
The Eminence in Shadow 8.8,
Love Chunibyo And Other Delusions 8.4,
Toradora-8.5,
GTO,
Special A Class-8.2,
Real Girl,
Your Lie In April-9,
Violet Evergarden-9.5.
