This is a lie. You will never see them again.

Whoever thought that having an anime with literally a trainload of bishonens without a permanent heroine or massive yaoi overtures would work must have been out of their wits.

My expectation for Miracle Train would be Hetalia with a lot of yaoi fodder and a lot of quirky jokes about the different parts of Tokyo that are represented by the six guys in the Oedo Line. That expectation was instantly killed after the first episode.

The show ended up being a girl-of-the-week kind of show with the same formula episode after episode. Some random girl gets on the Miracle Train on one of the stations along the Oedo Line.

She will calmly realize that she has entered an empty train even if it was plainly clear from the outside that there were people in the car. After mildly being freaked out for a few minutes, some random bishonen will pop up welcoming her.

Another one will pop up out of nowhere for some random banter with the first guy.

Suddenly, the girl will be surrounded by all the six guys and a dog.  Around this time, any girl in her right mind would be panicking because she might fall victim to gangraep.

But no, she is calmly reassured by some mysterious masked conductor who calls her by name. It should be suspicious, but the girl is strangely calmed down by the reassuring words of a strangers who refuses to show his face.

Now that the girl is reassured that she is now in safe bishonen hands, she should expect BL now. Really? Where’s the BL?

And she is now disappointed that it’s not the case.

Maybe it’s because I’m not familiar with the quirks of the different parts of Tokyo, but I find that the guys lack personality. Other than the area-specific characteristic like monjayaki and other things that serve as mere trivia to their own station/stop/district, they’re a pure failure as a decent personification of each train stop. They end up being mere display catalog of bishonens. Up until episode 5, the only guy I can identify was Shinjuku.

After all the introductions and small trivia portion, the train stations are supposed to help out the damsel in distress about their problems. That’s the other problem the show has. The problems are shallow.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve watched and liked a fair share of shallow anime. But those shows never pretended to be some kind of in-depth probe into the nature of young women. In fact, this show highlighted how trivial problems young ladies have. Okay, so the problems are not that trivial since things like that are relative, but it doesn’t exactly require an entire bishonen army to help out. But on perspective, if one-half of an episode was wasted on reassuring the girl-of-the-week that she’s going to be gangraeped, it’d be hard to find further depth in a character who will never be seen again in a future episode.

For some inexcusable prejudice of mine, this is what I envisioned a fujoshi to look like. If that was the case, I would have more love for the show.

Like most (thing)-of-the-week shows, I don’t think this show will evolve into something more than what it is. I’ll let the other girls squeal about smexy bishies. I’ll just quietly wait for the doujins.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Anime Miracle Train. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.