Kämpfer

A while back, I was sifting through the Watch List in a mood for some gender shenanigans and fight scenes, and since I wasn't quite ready to commit to 7 whole seasons of Ranma ½ at the time (I have since then started that show, review coming eventually), I decided to check out Kämpfer first. A cursory glimpse of the synopsis and opening song led me to expect the usual sort of cheeky, jiggly, silliness you find in a lot of these titles, and while it definitely IS all of those things, I also found this show surprisingly quite entertaining.

God, if only, am I right?

The simple premise is that our boring everyman protag (Natsuru) wakes up one day to find he's now a girl, and also has untamed superpowers. Natsuru can't "turn it off" and seems to change back into a dude at semi-random and often inopportune moments. There's a girl next door that Natsuru likes (Kaede) who sees HIM as a friend, but seems utterly captivated by Natsuru-F instead, and keeps asking Natsuru-M for her phone number, since they for SOME reason seem to know each other.

We later learn that there are others at the school with the same curse (?), who transform into someone else with superpowers at semi-random and get in fights with each other. Natsuru seems to be the only one who swaps gender, but the others swap personalities and hair colors, so if you're like me and believe gender isn't real anyway, that's more or less the same thing.

FINE, I guess you CAN bring a knife to a gunfight!

Turns out all these students have been unwittingly thrust into this strange proxy war between cosmic entities, fighting for chaos vs order throughout the universe or something like that, and they transform when in the presence of their rival factions. Fights often ensue, but over the course of the series, the students quickly make it clear that they're not actually all that interested in fighting the WAR, they're really more interested in fighting EACH OTHER over harem hijinks instead. I work at a college in my day job, and I can confirm, that's par for the course in terms of horny teenagers.

Who has time to fight when they could be playing spin the bottle at a slumber party instead?

Speaking of horny teenagers, the school in this show has a strict hard-coded gender split to disallow coed hookups among the students, which of course means their only option for romance is to be extremely gay, and they do so without hesitation. That was my first surprise. I fully expected the usual handwringing and convoluted rationalized heterosexuality, but nope. Just unabashedly girls kissin' girls, even discounting Natsuru's gender-swapping. Cool.

Ask any gender-segregated catholic school student, lesbianism is inevitable.

The other pleasant surprise was the nice and heavily varied soundtrack. I can't remember the last time I heard a ska song in an anime as background music, and I was digging it!

Anyway, Natsuru's would-be love interest Kaede turns out to be working for a mysterious THIRD party in the proxy war who wants to flip the whole thing on its ear, and she's also been given some kind of raging lesbian hypnosis powers or something? Things got a little wild and a bit unsettling in the final act, I won't lie. But our cast find a way to get through to Natsuru and defy the odds to win the battle, with the knowledge that the war will still carry on afterward. I'm told the manga adaptation has a bit more story and an "actual" Ending, but that's where the anime ends.

There were also two standalone OVA episodes that didn't really add anything to the main story except some twisted comedy, easily the cartooniest the series has gotten. Odd, but certainly not the worst way I've ever seen to cap off a series.

The reboot of Global Guts we didn't know we needed.

Either way, I found it to be a fun ride all the same. It's definitely a haphazard and disjointed series, don't expect "Masterful Storytelling" or a neat and tidy conclusion, but that's just the risk of watching the anime instead of reading the manga/light novel like everyone keeps telling me I should do with Every Single Anime I watch. The experience is delightfully whiplash, and a lot of people won't like that, but I certainly did!

Maybe the real treasure was this gun I found along the way.