Yeah, I think I’ll go with the English title just because it’s so ridiculous. And yeah, I’m going to go with my livepost format for this anime. You didn’t think I was going to write an essay on a show about a guy becoming a twin-tailed shoujo, did you?
— I’ll start this off by saying I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a girl with twintails in real life. It probably wasn’t a thing where I grew up. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I prefer medium to short hair on girls anyway.
— Even though he’s at his high school’s entrance ceremony, our hero Souji can’t help but ogle the various twintails around him. This sounds like a killer anime already. A girl nearby keeps grimacing and glaring at Souji. I bet she’s the childhood friend. In fact, I expect to be force-fed a bunch of stupid anime tropes and cliches.
— During class, Souji stupidly writes down on a questionnaire that he wants to start a twintails club. That same girl from the assembly then calls him an idiot under her breath, but at the same time, she has twintails. If she’s really a childhood friend, she must know all about his fetish, so it looks like someone can’t be honest about their true feelings. This is going to be one of those shows where there’s nothing remotely appealing about the protagonist, but the girls will compete for his affections anyway, huh?
— In fact, why isn’t this included in Harem Hill? Eh, I just don’t feel like it. Plus, if you really wanted to, you could argue that half of these shows should fall under the jurisdiction of Harem Hill. I gotta draw the line somewhere or else that stupid post would end up being over 5000 words long every week.
— Welp. But wait a minute, I don’t see any twintails on the middle girl. False fucking advertisement, yo.
— Yeah, he and Aika, the dark-haired, twintailed girl, are childhood friends. Then all of a sudden, they start sparring in the middle of a street. Just a couple of 15-year-old karate experts.
— Like always, you can only tell if a female character is an adult if she has giant breasts. #justshittyanimethings
— Not only is that lady an adult, she’s Souji’s mom. She then encourages Aika to hook up with her son later. Hilarious stuff. Never gets old. Let me start drawing a doujinshi where the mom joins in too.
— Silver-haired girl appears to be stalking our hero. And so it begins. Prepare yourself for the Hareming.
— Aika: “If you want a twintails club, just make one. I guess I could join if you’re desperate.” That was easy. I guess curry is all it takes to win her over.
— The silver-haired girl eventually introduces herself, which includes sexually assaulting Aika and calling her a trap. But hey, it’s girl-on-girl, so the hero merely goes, “Calm down! Let’s try to resolve this.” Way to stick up for your childhood friend, buddy.
— Really? Her name is Thuearle? Yeah, I’m never going to say that shit out loud.
— Anyway, the deranged-looking Thuearle shoves a bracelet in Souji’s face when he confirms that he likes twintails. Speaking of traps…
— S-she doesn’t have time to explain! She’ll just stand here and insist that you put the bracelet on while using lots of innuendos! No, she can’t explain while she stands here! Didn’t you hear? There’s no time!
— What’s funny, however, is that although the animation here isn’t anything special, it’s miles ahead of what we got in the Harem Hill shows (well, I haven’t watched the library show yet). Holy shit, were those shows ugly or what? I’ve only briefly scanned through Trinity Seven, but it’s a dumpster fire too.
— Souji suddenly comes to the realization that twintails would look great on Thuearle. I hope there’s a scene where he drools over an obaachan with twintails. Don’t let me down, anime. C’mon, I’m not exactly asking for much here. If he truly has a twintails fetish, then fucking go for it. Don’t give me this weak-ass shit.
— Thuearle says she’ll do anything if our hero puts the bracelet on. The sad thing is, you know what he’ll want. He’ll just ask her to get twintails, and it’ll be groanworthy as fuck. These shows are so sexually inert, they’re boring as hell.
— Oh, I highly doubt that:
But she finally wins him over when she tells him that the world will be robbed of twintails if he doesn’t put on the bracelet. Sure, I’ll believe what this random stranger tells me.
— So she shoves the bracelet onto Souji’s arm, then teleports all three of them to a different location. There, they find Strawberry Tails from earlier, but… gasp! She doesn’t have her twintails anymore! Thuearle was right! The world is coming to an end!
— When Strawberry Tails wakes up, however, she denies ever having twintails. It turns out the bad guys responsible for her looking, well, normal have also erased her desire to have twintails! This… this is so stupid it’s not even stupid funny. It’s just stupid, man. And of course, Souji’s reaction is predictable enough.
— Speaking of said Elemerians, here they are! Some fucking lizard king then goes, “Yes! Take it from them! Take the twintails from this world!” Yep, not even stupid funny. It’s just so direct and blunt about its joke that I can’t even be bothered to care. The whole thing is just kind of cringeworthy. With a show like Rail Wars!, there was at least the pretense that it was trying to be an educational show about trains. Gonna be the Twin-Tails!!, on the other hand, is so unabashed about its true intentions, it’s ends up not being as ridiculous and funny as it should be.
— For example, it’d be one thing if our hero merely gender-swapped and got twintails in order to save the world. But he’s not just saving the world. He’s saving the world from being robbed of twintails. Ironically, this ends up making the entire premise feel less ridiculous and surreal. Rather, all we get is a shitty joke, and the novelty is quickly wearing thin.
— There’s a reason I go back to Harem Hill over and over. The best harem shows to mock are the ones that take themselves seriously. Those shows genuinely believe that they have a great story to tell, and this is what makes them truly, truly ridiculous. This is what makes them worthy of scrutiny and examination. What’s equally fascinating and horrifying about those shows is that they’re entirely earnest. Then there are shows that are abjectly horrible like So, I Can’t Play H! Gonna be the Twin-Tails!!, on the other hand, is neither of those things. Rather, it’s both too self-aware and too safe to be funny. It’s firmly tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time, it doesn’t really have a great joke to deliver. It’s just hurr durr the world will be robbed of twintails! Okay…? Is that it? Again, the show merely becomes a shitty joke. Worst of all, it’s a joke that will repeat itself for the next three months.
— So the student council president gets captured too. And immediately, the lizard dude erases her twintails, which enrages the protagonist. He thus uses his bracelet to transform into that thing that you see above.
— At this point, there’s not much to say anymore. Our hero calls himself Tail Red, then uses his various abilities to defeat the lizard dude. Yawn. I don’t think I’ll be covering this show anymore.
— When Souji destroys some device, twintails magically reappear on girls’ heads. Elsewhere, the true antagonist delivers a speech to his subjects, but that about does it for the first and last episode I’ll ever watch. Oh well. No big loss.
Moe Sucks 
To be honest I laughed. I suppose that silly jokes trike me good, but I agree with this:
“Worst of all, it’s a joke that will repeat itself for the next three months.”
Is going to be difficult to keep this funny. The next episodes are just going to be self-aware (Hey guise, remember le twin-tails?) and even if that’s not the case they already set the stupidity-bar too high for its own good, so the introduction of new clichés or foolishness is only going to make it unbearable to watch.
Still I’m ok with this, I didn’t expected to laugh at all.
Weirdly enough, I somewhat admired its willingness to try to base its humor on the sheer absurdity of its premise, rather than calling out all the jokes it was making every time it made them (though it did do that, several times, so I’m also willing to accept it was accidental when they played it with a straight face). It’s basically camp, and intentionally so, and to some extent that could be okay as a premise… but there’s no way this joke can last. It’s gonna go full Dokuro if they try to stick with it, because it didn’t even have enough twintail jokes for one whole episode to begin with.
I suppose it could remain a sort of doofy camp action show as long as it doesn’t keep insisting upon its own “clever” premise joke over and over and over (just make it the unspoken background motivation behind everything, stupid but accepted), but even if it did that it’s still just phenomenally dumb, and something that’s campy and dumb has to stay funny or it’s simply uncomfortable to watch. And there are plenty of Japanese shows (not so much animated) that play up the camp angle, but they’re also usually not based on a single weirdly-specific joke, and they’re still pretty tough to watch unless you’re totally into the whole toku thing. But at least with a broader premise they can try for broader humor to maintain the mood.
So this is a show that basically shoots itself in its own foot at the start of the race. It could be camp action as long as it stays lighthearted and funny, but it’s intentionally focused itself on a single joke that couldn’t even stay funny for one episode. What are they going to do with the other dozen episodes, besides run this joke into the ground and/or check all the boxes on the trope list for this genre?
It’s probably not the worst first episode of anything this season, but anybody who enjoyed this is probably going to be way more disappointed with it in a couple weeks than with a show that was godawful to begin with. At least you knew those were never going to be good. I know some folks who genuinely adored this episode because they liked how it felt, but the joke will get old even for them in another episode or two. And then what?
This is pretty much how I felt. If this were a one-off OVA, I’d actually think it was pretty funny. But there’s no way this one-note joke can sustain itself over an entire cour.
Does anybody remember a horrible, horrible little concoction from 2007 called Tsuyo-kiss, during the height of the tsundere boom? At least this was better than that, somewhat.
For me, the new Godzilla is campy. Prometheus was campy (and hilarious). This show, on the other hand, just winks too much.
Honestly It made me laugh, if this season wasn’t so consistent I would give it a chance, also I suspect this twin-tails jokes will stale soon.
I get the sense that the show is trying to be a parody of multiple genres at once. The villains and bracelet are supposed to be parodies of Henshin Heroes (Super Sentai shows). The whole battle sequence is supposed to parody Battle-Magical Girl Anime. The Student Council President is a walking parody of Ojou Samas in Shoujos with Yuri subtext. The male protagonist is a caricature of harem protagonists and the harem genre in general. The costumes don’t look out of place from Vividred, Infinite Stratos, and many pseudo-mecha shows that put their cast in skimpy suits. I think that’s part of the humor here – seeing genre after genre being mocked in quick succession.
Given the wide net the show is casting, I think it is possible for them to continue keeping the jokes fresh through the season, since each of these genres have so much worthy of mockery. But whether or not that happens is another question altogether.
Practically every show out there is already a self-parody of all those tropes you listed, so it’s really a self-defeating exercise. The only thing Twintails has accomplished is telling us that it’s in on the joke.
You are all thinking too bloody much… THAT is the joke it’s playing on anime watchers like you fellas.. LMAO, Just watch it… Laugh at the token big boobs bouncing.. Grin at The Tsundere character with the crush that is only a secret to the protagonist…. Enjoy the art take the laughs and stop analyzing crap to death… It’s anime there are more than enough pretentious over done stories out there if that is what you are looking for. Especially in the Horror/Psychological genres ugh Scooby Doo does it better just saying.