First Impression – C³

Where boxes are weapons of mass destruction

Something about C3 caught my attention and convinced me that it wouldn’t be another “magical girl thing meets typical teenage boy” anime. Something. Not sure what, but let’s see if my intuition was right!
Cursed boxes and awesome names? Sounds like my kind of anime. I’ve been pretty excited about this since I saw the preview, so I hope your intuition is right OC!

Our protagonist, Yachi Haruaki wakes up one morning and has a mysterious black box delivered to his doorstep. While he has no idea what it is, he explains to the postal service person that his father is one of those Japanese parents that completely neglect their children and work overseas. In his case, Haruaki’s father is just too busy collecting antiques to be home. Having no idea what the box could be, he starts feeling it up, which causes it to glow. Haruaki is justifiably weirded out and decides to ignore it.

Later that night, he hears someone in the kitchen. Checking it out, he finds a naked girl eating his food. The girl calls Haruaki a pervert (yet she’s the one running around naked) and threatens to curse him. So Haruaki finds the girl some clothes and gives her some tea with the rice crackers she was eating. He also seems to accept the situation pretty damn fast.

Somehow, rice crackers seem like a less moe food item than doughnuts

When asked her name, the girl introduces herself as Fear. However, when Haruaki asks about how she managed to come from that mysterious box, he receives a rice cracker to the face. Fear hates that form, but Haruaki’s father told her that travelling there in that form would be easier. Since Haruaki is Honatsu’s son, she decides to explain things.

It turns out that Fear is a cursed object that receives hate and turns it back on her owner (the more ill intent she receives, the more human she becomes). However, Honatsu sent her to his son to life this curse on her because Haruaki has a high resistance to curses (plus the land is pure) and therefore, she would be harmless. Since curses are like negative thoughts, positive thoughts would negate them. So Haruaki says that doing good deeds would most likely solve her problem.

Suddenly, harem member #2, who’s brought over breakfast, interrupts them. Harem member #2 immediately gets suspicious after seeing a mysterious girl in only her shirt and striped pantsu and Fear calls harem member #2 ugly. Haruaki suggests eating in order to stop the catfight, but then Fear starts it again. This time they argue about breasts and harem member #2 breaks the pot handles in rage.

Childhood friend/girl with big boobs? Check.

Things continue breaking as Fear and Konoha (harem member #2) are introduced. It turns out that Konoha is a childhood friend (always a harem staple) that lives in a detached room in the house. She gets mad when Fear is allowed to stay in a guest room, but cheers up (or more like stats taunting Fear) after she mentions that her and Haruaki go to the same school. Since he’s kind of abandoning Fear, Haruaki gives her a rubix cube and the TV remote to help her pass the time. Fear doesn’t mind though, because the TV fascinates her.

That is, until the cat people program ends and Fear starts feeling lonely. She changes into some regular clothing and heads outside while mumbling about not being lonely. However, Fear has xenophobia, so she keeps hiding from people until she accidentally bumps into a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper calls her a lost child (much to Fear’s chagrin) and suddenly everyone and their grandmother decides to see what’s up.

Fear is considerably less angry when one of the other shopkeepers solve a side to the rubix cube she was carrying around with her and they offer her food. Fear acts like she knows everything and then mentions that she’s with Haruaki. So the townspeople are glad that they know where her house is so she’s not a lost child anymore and Fear asks why they care so much. The townspeople just say that they couldn’t leave her by herself and suddenly Fear decides to leave and reverts back to tsundere mode. However, she (kind of ) thanks them for taking care of her before she leaves.

When she gets back home, Fear decides to clean. The word ‘clean’ here is interchangeable with ‘destroy the house’. One exploded vacuum cleaner and a completely ruined living room later, Fear washes the shirt she was wearing earlier. When she hangs it out to dry, the wind blows it away, so Fear jumps a couple feet in the air to catch it. When she lands, she looks inside the house and realises the destruction she caused.

That washing machine didn’t stand a chance.

When Haruaki and Konoha get home (and find it destroyed), Haruaki gets angry and Fear goes and sulks. However, when he leaves with Konoha to go shopping, he learns that Fear didn’t want others taking care of her and they figure that her ‘cleaning’ the house might be part of that. Also, suddenly Konoha is super considerate to Fear and says that she did a bunch of weird stuff too when her and Haruaki first met because she didn’t know any better.

So Haruaki goes and apologises for getting mad at Fear (damn this guy is tolerant) since she just became a person and doesn’t have any common sense yet. So Haruaki hands Fear back her rubix cube, Fear helps him make dinner, and all is well once again. Haruaki assures Fear that she’ll be able to receive positive thoughts and lift her curse somehow.

When your hair is longer than your skirt, you should probably WEAR A LONGER SKIRT.

After the credits, a blonde lady smoking a cigarette explains to a nervous cab driver that she’s come to Japan to ‘clean out the trash’.

Please, blonde lady. Kill them all.

Okay, so my intuition was off. This is about as typical of a storyline as it gets, with typical characters as well. Haruaki nonchalently accepts a magic, naked girl into his life and decides that he has all the time in the world to try and fix her problems. What. How do you just trust a random girl claiming to be cursed without jumping to the conclusion that she’s a lunatic? This sort of BS anime logic is rife throughout the entire episode. Haruaki will forgive her random, nutball freeloader for destroying his house and totally ruining his life just because he’s a nice, lead character and that’s what nice lead characters do to get TONS OF ASS. I’m not a fan of harem shows, if you couldn’t tell.

The only time harems manage to entertain me is if the characters are kooky enough to keep me hooked. At least Denpa Onna had interesting characters, even if they didn’t really do anything exciting. Nyan Koi! also had a great cast, and the premise was ridiculous but fun to watch. C3 has…boring characters and a plot that is barely a plot. This chick just needs to get people to direct positive emotions towards her to be free of her vaguely described curse, right? You can bet even that thin sliver of direction is going to take a backseat to rotating screentime between all dem bitches so we get all kinds of different colours of panty shots. Goody! Fiya/Fear is the annoying loli tsundere, Konoha is the clingy childhood friend and Haruaki is the token nice guy. Unless a new, more exciting character appears, I give up on this show. There’s no promise of a deeper plot, only the promise of a typical harem story you could find anywhere. It’s not BAD per se, but it’s incredibly average for the genre.

I really only survived through the episode because of Silver Link’s animation. It’s flamboyant and uses a lot of strange colour schemes, lighting effects and angles, but it keeps you interested. It’s a bit superfluous and flashy considering that nothing is even happening, but it’s all I had to keep me engaged during the entire episode. Shiny lights and even shinier ass cheeks. Oh well, at least the characters are fairly cute, I’m sure that will give the guys something to look at. As for me…yeah, this is so not my thing.

Okay, yeah. My expectations for this show have lowered considerably. I knew this was going to be a harem show, I just didn’t think it would be so… so… haremy. I mean, I enjoyed the fact that Haruaki actually told Fear to stop her bitching after she threw a cracker at his face, but where was that the rest of the episode? He just kind of accepted it. Okay, pros and cons. Let’s positive thinking! On the plus side, Fear is still a kick ass name. Also, if I watch this anime, I am guaranteed enough pantsu exposure to last me two lifetimes, if not more. The girls in this can’t even complain if a male character sees anything, because it’s their own damn fault. That school uniform isn’t all that attractive in the first place.

I guess another pro would be the animation itself. It is extremely pretty and I love the colouring done here. It totally reminds me of UtaPri (Silverlink had a hand in that show as well, so it makes sense). The music didn’t really stand out to me either, but the seiyuu did a pretty good job here. The characters weren’t all that interesting, but at least the voice acting was good. Speaking of characters, I’m usually pretty tolerant of tsunderes, but something about Fear just rubs me the wrong way. I think most of this stems from the scene with the townspeople where Fear acted like a child who thought they knew everything. That kind of arrogant attitude annoys me I guess (though I liked Dalian… I don’t even know what annoys me about Fear. She just does). She got better towards the end of the episode though.

I’m pretty confused as to where Fear got that outfit she was wearing when she got outside the house (because they sure as hell weren’t Kotoha’s), but whatever. This was the first episode after all, so maybe it will improve somewhere along the line. We haven’t even gotten into the whole cursed object thing yet, so maybe things will get less boring there. Plus the first episode to almost every harem show is boring anyways.  I’m just going to keep watching in hopes that it gets less fanservicy and less stereotypical. My entire hope is riding on the events from that preview. Now excuse me while I curl up in a corner muttering how “It’s for the scene with that psychotic looking blonde lady” repeatedly. She seems like she’ll be the highlight of the show now.

Preview:

WHERE was the plot? WHAT happened to the cursed objects plot? SOMETHING needs to be done about those skirts.

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We live, laugh, enjoy and strictly believe on "more the merrier". When together, we usually come up with very chatty, conversation-based episodics and interesting posts.
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26 Responses to “First Impression – C³”

  1. Dan-go says:

    I watched this while completing the tasks for lumbridge in runescape (my brother is retarded and for somereason asked me to help him with a game i’ve never played) so i might not have devoted full attention to this, but it seems abit like a cross over between denpa onna and any kind of tsun dere. fingers crossed for an interesting plot to start happening though

    • Karakuri says:

      I totally see where you’re coming from with the denpa onna thing. And Fear is totally a tsundere. Yes please. Plot. ANYTHING.

      • Dan-go says:

        I dont like it when tsun deres begin to show their dere side in the very first episode though. it worries me, i prefer gradual changes, kinda like in toradora

        • Karakuri says:

          Ahaha unlike Fear, I liked Taiga from the start. Seeing Fear change gradually as a character would be nice.

  2. BlackBriar says:

    This is the first episode and none of us can really pass judgment yet but this feels like so many series we’ve seen before. Except for the rubix cube, that’s a bit of a twist so I’ll give it a chance. I really wonder how people would react if they found a naked tsundere loli raiding your kitchen for food late at night.

    Fiya reminds me of a lot of familiar Tsundere loli: Kore Wa Zombie Desu Ka’s Haruna, Aria from Hidan no Aria and Index.

    I imagine the plot is actually going to start in the second episode because the lady with the cigarette screams trouble.

    • Karakuri says:

      Agreed that the first episode doesn’t necessarily reflect on the anime as a whole (hell, look at Blood-C) but you’d think that they would try to make it at least a bit interesting. Despite disliking the genre, I’ve watched a ton of harem shows and this just seemed like a combination of all of them.

      Yeah, I don’t think the plot has even begun moving yet. This whole episode just felt like it was covering Fear adjusting to the island (or wherever they are).

      • Dan-go says:

        Blood C was unique in that it trolled the hell out of everyone into thinking it was a stupid plotless anime when it was actually a stupid plotless mind screw. With a movie attached to the end of it.

  3. Jrow says:

    What I liked most about this episode was cow tits. Not because cow tits has cow tits, but because she was actually talking back to Fear. That was funny to me.

    The episode really didn’t provide anything in the way of plot. Episode 2 might have something more interesting, but I wasn’t really interested in C3 to begin with, so for people that stick around to see more C3, enjoy your pantsu shots. 😉

    • Karakuri says:

      ahaha cow tits is a great nickname. I can’t say that I’m fond of their constant bickering, but it might end up growing on me. Who knows.

      Hopefully the plot starts moving next episode… Oh yes. The pantsu shots. Will do.

  4. Hime says:

    RUBIKS CUBE WILL GET YOU LAID.

    Lesson learned C3. Lessson learned.

  5. Amutofan123 says:

    Meh. Just meh. Typical bland protagonist, typical tsundere loli, typical everything. I loved the animation though; it was so colorful~

    • Karakuri says:

      The animation was the highlight for sure. I’ll be watching the next episode to see if things improve.

  6. Alynn says:

    I didn’t even get through the first episode of this. I died at the two girls meeting. I mean really. The most typical characters ever. I was already tired of the stereotypes in Aria the Scarlet Ammo, but again? I feel like I’m seeing the same characters again. :I

    I don’t think I am going to end up watching this. Probably not.

    • Karakuri says:

      I wasn’t expecting anything this stereotypical either… But as I’ve said a hundred times already, I hope it improves. and if not, I’ll watch it for the animation.

  7. Foshizzel says:

    Well we all found the next loli of the fall season! I do want to see a bit more of this series I was not sold on the character designs yet! But I will watch a few more episodes, I guess the creators loved portal! So they made Fear a companion cube wooooo!

    I want to see the Yandare side of fear! I remember the preview had something “dark” about her, unless that was just a way to lure people in? I wouldn’t put it past a anime company doing that.

    Nice tag! xD

    • Karakuri says:

      Ugh, I should have known something was up when I enjoyed most of the summer anime XD. I’m giving this two or three more episodes at most.

      YES YANDERE FEAR WHERE IS SHE. Maybe they’ll pull a Kore wa Zombie when the blonde woman shows up and the characters will be useful for once.

      Yes,I think that will be my new one since the Hanazawa Virus one STILL eludes me.

  8. Yvoon says:

    ARGH!! Cliched obstinate tsunderes and unnecessary panty shots all over the place.

    Sorry guys, this is off my list.

  9. Samantha Zan says:

    Okay, I actually had no idea what this show was about but now I don’t even care. I mean seriously! I predicted almost everything that happened in this episode! And coming from me, that’s not a good thing XD.

    Fist of all, Fear is a BADASS name, but this girl hear isn’t taking advantage of it. I mean, she seems like another Tsun Tsundere MOE MOE character voiced by Rie Kugimya, even if it wasn’t her xD (Still love the queen of tsunderes though xD). But more importantly, our main character here, Haruaki is the cookie-cutter of a protaganist that I’ve ever seen! I know anime characters do have that quality in there, but this guy just made my face go BLERRRGGHHH. Though I do have to say, I think the only character I like in this show SOOOO far is Minori Chirihara’s character (Can’t remember name >.>). She’s somewhat sane, but though she’s just a tool for Fear to go all Tsun Tsun on.

    Anyway, as you can tell, I do not like this show so far, but the animation is the one saving grace about it, which gives me at least another watch for 2 or 3 episodes.

    • Karakuri says:

      Just saying this now, episode 2 is SO MUCH BETTER for SO MANY REASONS.

      The animation is still a plus too.

  10. Dan-go says:

    OKAY NO ONE DROP THIS SHOW AFTER EPISODE 1. atleast watch episode 2. Totally different genre to what we all think it is. Mind blown. It’s not amazingly good, but it’s definitely not a denpa onna copy

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