Just want to note that Uchi no Ko is about a helicopter dad and Okasuki is about a helicopter mom. Both are terrible and why this is the best consumable entertainment for this day and age.
I wonder what made both programs air on the same season? It’s like one is on the giving end and one is on the receiving end. And because they air in the same season I can’t help but to compare them.
I really like Okasuki in that the Mom character is both an oil tanker load of main female trope but, add a lot of “mom” to it. Mamako does a good job I think, in that you can feel the irritation of a child who is just sick and tired of his mother being mom. Good job, in this case, is that I can pick up that feeling well, and yet not let it overrun the tone of the show.
Well, the tone of the show is kind of not good, to put it mildly. It’s got that strong, late night meta-fantasy isekai harem stench all over it, except it isn’t quite it. I don’t think it’s a bad package overall but it is kind of hard to swallow personally. Maybe I just don’t have a mom fetish.
It’s in that contrast that we see Uchi no Ko, or something equally long of a title as Okasuki that I won’t repeat in this actual post. Let’s put aside the fact of the main female character and her various plot events and attributes for now, but look at Uchi no Ko from the “dad’s” point of view. I think it is a pretty powerful look at a very naive and small-brain perspective to parenting.
I’m harsh on this because it isn’t even wrong, it is just not the way to go as a storytelling style. And in that sense the cover in Uchi no Ko is that he isn’t her real dad, even if essentially that’s who he is. It’s sort of a fantasy fulfillment, if you look at the overall story and how it ends. Which is why we are all in the present and now for the child.
There is also a timelessness to Uchi no Ko that is amusing, but right now the early going of the anime is making all these parent feelers tingle. It’s an easy way to write a parent-child relationship while having the audience dote on Latina like that. It’s like a parental fantasy in which you “build” your child like a slime builds his SimCity world while being really adorable. In that sense, at least Uchi no Ko is not entirely shameless (yet?), and deploys some emotional nuances.
It’s certainly a much more comfortable thing to witness than parading humorous MILF tropes around. But I think that might just be a matter of preference, since children do grow up (and then we can talk about Araoto).
It’s maybe more like, when you do world building with a fictional world, okay, we all do that. But it’s kind of weird when you’re writing a story in which, in essence, is a MMORPG character creator. It blends the weirdness of a “cartoons come to life” meta with standard anime character development. The end result is just kind of silly on one end, and icky on the other.
In a way this has been also the isekai genre’s strength. The genre takes away one layer of meta for us, and ever more steadily, otaku anime today get right to the point.
