Uraboku episode 1

Oth­er­wise known as Uragiri wa Boku no Namae o Shit­teiru. Oth­er­wise known as Betrayal knows my name. Oth­er­wise known as that BL anime. But over the course of my anime fan­dom I’ve found myself develop an increas­ing tol­er­ance towards fujioshi bait. Some­thing to do with fol­low­ing Hetalia for over 50 epis­odes I guess, although watch­ing Kur­oshit­suji and X also helps. So this sea­son I gave both Hakouiki and Uraboku a go des­pite the fact that the serve their main pur­pose is to parade bish­ies past the screen. But rather dis­ap­point­ingly, neither were really any good.

I’ve stated sev­eral times before that there is noth­ing more bor­ing than watch­ing a bunch of girls being insuf­fer­ably nice to each other. I have no dis­covered that this state­ment is lack­ing because watch­ing a bunch of lady­boys being insuf­fer­ably nice to each other is just as dull. That’s pre­cisely what bugged me about this epis­ode. These char­ac­ters aren’t real men. OK, I know one of them is actu­ally a women rein­carn­ated or some­thing, but even the other male char­ac­ters act like char­ac­ters out of a yuri anime. Their con­ver­sa­tions are so lack­ing in life that it’s pain­fully dull to watch.

The emo-ing about isn’t quite so bad I’ll admit. It does feel lazy though, as though so little thought has gone into why these char­ac­ters are act­ing all emo. It’s more inter­est­ing than watch­ing them being insuf­fer­ably nice to each other but neither is it par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing to watch. The imagery is quite obvi­ously inspired by that of a cer­tain Clamp series that also hap­pens to have the same name as the 24^th let­ter of the alpha­bet, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. But really, if you quite liked this series I’d recom­mend watch­ing that series instead. I’m not even par­tic­u­larly big fan of X but Uraboku does feel like a cheap knock-off. It’s not ter­rible, but hon­estly you should be watch­ing your­self some Clamp. Or altern­at­ively, watch an anime with slash pair­ings that involve real men and not a bunch of lady­boys. Like Durarara.