Taishou Otome Otogibanashi

Self-styled pessimist Tamahiko Shima lives alone in the mountains of Chiba after losing the use of his right hand in the same car accident that took his mother's life. Deemed incapable by his father and other wealthy relatives, he has been forced into exile; he experiences idle days of reading and sleepless nights of irrepressible angst. True to the Shimas' famous pride and determined not to disgrace his family, Tamahiko is resigned to his new duty—stay in the mountains and wait for death to put an end to his suffering.

However, on one snowy night, Tamahiko's insomnia is interrupted by someone knocking at the door. He then meets the 14-year-old Yuzuki Tachibana, who announces that she has come to be his future wife! Suddenly, Tamahiko remembers his father promising to send him a bride to assist him with impediments to his daily life.

Although she was sold as a bride to repay her family's debts, Yuzuki proves to be thoughtful, diligent, and dedicated to Tamahiko. Will the world-weary teenager prove insensitive to the rare breeze of kindness her presence brings to his monotonous existence?

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Tachibana, Yuzuki Main

Aizawa, Saya Japanese

Shima, Tamahiko Main

Kobayashi, Yuusuke Japanese

Shima, Tamako Supporting

Miyamoto, Yume Japanese

Shiratori, Kotori Supporting

Itou, Ayasa Japanese

Atsumi, Ryou Supporting

Anzai, Chika Japanese

Shiratori, Hakaru Supporting

Toki, Shunichi Japanese

Tachibana, Mother Supporting

Tsunematsu, Ayumi Japanese

Shima, Tamao Supporting

Yamaya, Yoshitaka Japanese

Manabe, Tamasuke Supporting

Hatano, Wataru Japanese

Shima, Tamayoshi Supporting

Sakuya, Shunsuke Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Oowada, Tomoyuki Producer

Itou, Hirofumi Producer

Nishimae, Shuka Producer

Reviews

Dec 24, 2021

Stark700

Recommended

Do you enjoy an innocent historical romance between two characters tied by fate? Want to experience a show with a healthy dose of charming love? Then, Taisho Otome Fairy Tale might be something that interest you. And just like the title, this is a like a fairy tale with two humans.

Adapted by the manga of the same name, I don't say this lightly about historical romances. Honestly, historical theme shows are often talked about for their battles, history, and overall, cultural context. It's not too often when romance is a central part of the show's context. That's where we meet the fated pair, Tamahiko Shima ... and Yuzuki Tachibana. We find out why Tamahiko is banished by his family and developed inferiority about himself. On the other hand, Yuzuki serves as a beacon of hope and falls for Tamahiko almost like first sight. Is it fate? Perhaps and honestly, this show binds them together like they were destined to be. Yet, it's not always easy for Tamahiko to open up to others because of his past. And for that reason, the show has dedicates time for Tamahiko to grow out of his shell while giving Yuzuki the chance to experience what's like to be in love.

The first few episodes is nothing short of being charming when we meet our main characters. Yuzuki is upbeat but also very kind and caring to just about anyone. Towards Tamahiko, she grows deep affections towards him at almost first sight. It's the type of love that may have even surprised herself. Nonetheless, the show makes it clear that they are a pair that's tied by fate and through connections, they grow closer together. Such a simple idea makes this anime a sensation, as the more I watch them bond, the more their character pair felt real. Their connection presents an emotional experience that's more than just love or closure. Tamahiko would've been much worse without Yuzuki's presence as his life changes forever after he meets her.

Despite the small supporting roster, this show proves itself capable of making characters that are worth watching outside of the Tamahiko and Yuzuki. For instance, we meet Tamako Shima, Tamahiko's younger sister who initially treated him with disdain but ultimately grows to trust him. Upon meeting Yuzuki, she also forges a strong bond with her and realizes that dreams can be achieved. There's also the delinquent thief girl Ryou Atsumi who causes many problems with Tamahiko's estate. But after seeing Yuzuki's compassion and serenity, she changes to become a more friendlier and positive person. After awhile, you may notice the pattern of Yuzuki's positive influence on others. Indeed, she's like an angel in this anime who serves as a positive role model to just about anyone.

At the heart of the show is the theme of love but the storytelling itself commits to character building. The most prominent example is Tamahiko as he develops from a pessimistic person to someone with hope and dreams. He realizes that there's a light in the dark tunnel thanks to Yuzuki and ultimately fights to be a better person. In essence, this show dedicates its time to show how anyone can make a positive light and turn their life around. Without Yuzuki, I can guarantee that Tamahiko would be much worse off, or perhaps even dead. Unfortunately, his siblings outside of the main supporting cast gets little characterization. With just 12 episodes, the anime did not have enough time to expand all of its casts' roles.

Coming off of their most recent adaptation, I was less than thrilled about SynergySP taking the role to adapt this show. Yet, they nailed it with this adaptation because the elegant visual quality of this anime works wonderfully. It gives the sensation of youth with its female cast while also having depressing moments in the story. Character designs fits for the historical setting and makes an impact with their human expressions. Comedy is no shortfall in the show either when we have hilarious moments between Tamahiko and Yuzuki. It's when the anime knows how to sell iself that it becomes successful.

To add on the positive elements of the show, it even has a soundtrack that works its magic to the core. Theme songs for both the opening and ending are soft beat yet carefully decorated with a serene feeling. Character voices and mannerism are protrayed with delicate care to suit every casts' personalities. And when you have a character such as Yuzuki, it takes a tremendous talent to be in her shoes. And finally, Kotori's singing brings in a lot of charm to the show especially when she has her own devoted fans.

Taisho Otome Fairy Tale is the type of show that we get once in awhile among the seemingly endless amount of soap operas, high school dramas, or isekai harems these days. Taking place in a historical setting, we witness two characters coming together and experiencing the very essence of being human. That is, being human means we have to explore our potentials and, this anime managed to knock to bring out the best of that.

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jun 21, 2023

Benx2019

Mixed Feelings

The animation is pretty mediocre. No real flash to any of the scenes, character animation is just alright. Although the backgrounds are actually pretty solid. The characters are not all that impressive either, they're not shallow as a puddle, but they are not incredibly deep. The story has decent premise and leads to some fun hijinks, but that being said it's not too involved. The pacing is good for the most part, but the middle struggles a bit. Voice acting is pretty average. It's not lifeless, but it's also not at all impressive. The soundtrack is pretty good and the op/ed is also decent. Overall ... it's cute and I enjoyed it, but it felt a little dull. The voice acting plus the mediocre character animation just made the entire thing feel a little lifeless. I think that was really what held this anime back, a lack of effort in some key areas. Voice acting and character animation might not seem like a big deal, but they impact the ability of the show to move the audience. It's a rom/com drama, so I expect to be moved a bit more and I felt this was somewhat lacking in that area. 6.4/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 24, 2021

SingleH

Not Recommended

This is the kind of show that, if written by a man, would’ve been rightly viewed as an incel fantasy about having a submissive, underaged fuckdoll. However, it’s written by a woman, so it should therefore be viewed as a controlling female fantasy about a short, maidenly goody two-shoes healing her tall, rich, handsome man-baby whose emotionally vulnerability pushes him to rely on her for everything, gazing at no woman other than her. Most of the anime community is male, and most of these men aren’t exactly rolling in women, so the resulting subculture is one that has a warped, rose-tinted view of female literature. ... You’ll often hear people express sentiments like: “Anime is misogynistic. Most anime and manga authors are otaku manchildren, and all they want is to create female characters who appeal to their perverted fantasies.” Indeed, these opinions may seem hard to dispute, because while the part about the entire medium being misogynistic is debatable, the part about male authors often not knowing how to write female characters definitely isn’t. However, my personal favorite is this: “Men are not socialized to recognize uncomplicated, unsexual fondness for a female character, and their association with fiction proves this.” Say whatever you want about contemporary ideology cultivating the belief that men are primitive beasts who should be degraded into thinking of themselves as rapist monsters—I’m not trying to start irrelevant controversy here—but this opinion is the epitome of what I’m talking about. The people of this community, both the outnumbered girls and the boys who outnumber them, simply know nothing of popular female literature.

There are literary masterpieces written by women just as there are literary masterpieces written by men (I hope that goes without saying), but there’s a very glaringly obvious reason that—oh, I don’t know—the Fifty Shades of Grey book series sold over 150 million copies worldwide. Let me ask, have you ever read any manga aimed at Japanese women? Literally 99% of them feature women embracing traditional roles and following the lead of a dashing older man, 99.9% of their doujins foster smutty dreams about being submissive fuckdolls, and anything which doesn’t feature a female MC is almost guaranteed to be fujoshi trash. When I went to go see Promare, the theater wasn’t filled with old-ass Gainax nerds hyped about the next big Imaishi project. It was filled with teenage girls shrieking at the screen, acting just as obsessive, shameless, and depraved as ANY male otaku I’ve EVER seen at ANY idol concert. Gosh, just thinking about what the theatre audience must be like for My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission makes my skin crawl. Now listen. I’m not trying to make this a competition, but the point is made: BOTH sexes are filled with antisocial degenerates possessed with lurid fantasies and their own preferences for fanservice. This might shock you, but different women have different tastes and different forms of pandering media. Some like, "being swept away by a domineering ikemen who competes with other ikemen to claim my heart and bend me over,” and others like, “healing a broken boy so he falls in love with me instead of one of those other sluts competing for his attention.” Taisho Otome Otogibanashi just happens to fall in the latter category.

And I’m not saying any of this to detract from the show. If you can tell a compelling story based around fetishistic wish-fulfillment, that’s awesome. I just wanted to articulate the fact that, yes, this show is rooted in trashy sexual fantasies, just not the male kind which you may be tempted to think. The real reason I’m giving this show such a low score is much more simple: it’s just boring and ugly. Yuzuki Tachibana, our lovely fourteen year old protagonist, gets sold and married off to Tamahiko Shima, the seventeen year old edgelord who’s totally not just going through a phase, Mom, I swear! Seriously, the first episode opens with this edgy grainy filter and overdramatic letterbox over the entire screen while Tamahiko narrates his tragic backstory, and the second Yuzu shows up on screen, the grainy filter and letterboxed margins disappear. At that moment I realized this show would continue to have the subtlety of a brick to the face, and this is a problem not only with the symbolism, but also with every character and every single piece of dialogue. Its historical setting can be mildly interesting in ways I’ll talk about in a second, but the actual elements of the show just come across like those of a generic, modern day highschool romcom. If you’re comfortable viewing this as the non-pornographic fetish-fantasy which it’s clearly supposed to be for reasons aforementioned, then great, but that’s not what I signed up for, and if you don’t feel like projecting yourself onto the submissive maiden or the edgy boy in need of your womanly healing, what you’re left with is two boring, one-dimensional characters whose dramatic backstories add little to the tedium of their lives.

Its presentation is also terribly lackluster, and since the animation itself is pretty shoddy, the whole show often borders on being downright ugly. The color design just ruins everything. I never thought I’d live to see the day where I recommend Demon Slayer of all things, but that show legitimately does have a much better color scheme to fit the Taisho era (it’s also a convenient example to use because literally everyone has seen it). In the manga, everyone’s hair and clothes are shaded with much deeper and darker blacks, but everything in the anime has a color palette leaning more toward grey, and the whole show just looks kind of washed out as a result. However, while I still think it looks bad on an artistic level, it was this hazy presentation which got me thinking about something much more interesting, and the only element of this show which I actually really liked. This show is called Taisho Otome Otogibanashi, A Taisho Maiden’s Fairytale, and the more I watched, the more I got the feeling this title was supposed to be interpreted not simply as a romantic hook to bait viewers in, but as a literal description of the story, because in context, the show itself feels like a fairy tale. Taisho Otome Otogibanashi, the manga, has a sequel called Showa Otome Otogibanashi, and in it, the two lovers meander around a rapidly radicalizing imperial society, deeply depressed, and actively wanting to commit double suicide, and while we were comparing that manga with this one on /a/, someone posted this greentext as a joke:
>extremely cute and vanilla love story
>followed by an edgy as fuck sequel where main characters want to kill themselves
>extremely liberal and democratic era
>followed by an edgy as fuck era where everyone becomes imperialist war criminals
Now, while this greentext did directly inspire the thematic interpretation I’m about to discuss, it’s also extremely reductionist. Describing Taisho as an “extremely liberal and democratic era” is over-stating things a lot. It's definitely true that the Taisho period saw a lot of political and social movements towards liberal democracy and attempts at government reform, but on the whole, the era is better characterized as chaotic and unstable, plus these movements and reforms never really coalesced into any lasting form, all the while suppression acts like the Peace Preservation Law were being passed in order to consolidate power away from the people and more toward police and military factions. This is why from the turn of the 19th century all the way up until the end of the war, the technological development of the Japanese countryside was nearly a century behind that of the cities, because all their resources were being devoted to capitalizing on the nationalism of the Meiji Restoration, industrializing the nation’s heartland, and modernizing the nation’s military—which the government had long since lost control over—for the sole purpose of creating and expanding an empire and becoming a world power as quickly and aggressively as humanly possible, over a hundred years after the initial industrial revolution took place, leaving the old isolationist Japan in the dust. The history lesson I’m giving you right now may feel exhaustive for a MAL review, especially one concerning a fetish show like this, but I promise this is all relevant.

The earthquake featured in episodes ten and eleven was a real event called The Great Kanto Earthquake. In the show, we’re treated to scenes of everyone coming together, hugging it out, and aiding in the relief effort, but in real life, ultranationalist cells among the military police force in the city center were working with civilian vigilantes to take advantage of the chaos and use it as a pretext to massacre political dissidents and commit ethic cleansing against thousands of Koreans living in the region. Thinking about it more soberly, Taisho would be better described as an era of idealism and hope for change, and this is why I feel this story works so well as a literal fairy tale (otogibanashi) of the Taisho era. Considering the fetishistic nature of the series I discussed in the first two paragraphs, it can also be said that, in a meta sense, this show acknowledges the proliferation of smutty literature that occurred throughout Taisho. A great deal of erotic poems and stories got popular as a result of the influx of laxer social standards, and the increased popularity of female authors also had a huge impact since libidinous poetry was especially popular among female readership. On top of all of this, it was also the era in which love marriages started to be more idealized over arranged marriages, which is obviously a huge theme in this particular story. I don’t know, maybe I’m overthinking this and giving the author WAY too much credit, but either way, I think it’s a cool way to view the series, because as far as simple naming schemes go, it's honestly really clever. Now we just need Heisei Otome Otogibanashi about a loveless marriage between a salaryman and a sengyo-shufu. Forget historical commentary, the doujins practically write themselves.

Thank you for reading.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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