It’s two episodes, and a sort of spin-off from Excel Saga, and like it, it’s crammed full of meta humor, pop culture references, over-the-top satire and incomprehensible nonsense. I suspect that the initial inspiration was Shinichi Watanabe’s appreciation for the seiyuu Kobayashi Yumiko, because one of the things that stands out most about it is the extraordinary job she did. It’s as if it was written as a showcase for her talent, because Poemii talks a mile a minute virtually nonstop through both episodes. Beyond that though, it’s just very, very strange and silly.

First off, it has a very specific and irritating flaw that I’ve seen a few times with anime and manga (most recently and frustratingly with Hope You’re Happy Lemon). It goes to great effort to lay out this awful trauma the MC went through in the past and the profound impact it’s had on her ever since, then when the current story starts, the trauma is basically entirely forgotten. There’s no resolution, no lasting effects, no struggle to overcome it - just “poof” and it vanishes. She’s still awkward and unsure around people, but it’s just generic “socially awkward character” stuff - the specific and detailed and supposedly crippling trauma basically never made it out of the first episode. The only time it’s even really noted is when she learns that her boyfriend’s imouto has been betrayed by her supposed friends, and she has a brief flashback to her own experience, but then that’s just context for her to tell the imouto that she used to believe that nobody can be trusted and friends will always betray you, but she doesn’t any more. That’s it? Years of living entirely subject to that trauma and then it’s just “I used to think this, but I don’t any more?”

The most brazen example - there’s a scene late in the series in which she and the hot boyfriend are going on an overnight trip on their own. They’re literally at the train station, and she’s dressed up and looking radiant, and he gets a call from someone telling him that her love rival is having some sort of emotional crisis and he actually abandons her and rushes off to rescue the rival. And then it’s not even mentioned again! We’re expected to believe not only that this girl who only recently had an all-consuming traumatic association with being betrayed was not only perfectly fine with her boyfriend blatantly betraying her by abandoning her at the train station to go rescue her rival, but that it’s such an insignificant event that it’s not even worth mentioning again? What the hell?

In the beginning, he claims that she interests him because she has such a strong sense of herself. By the end, she’s constantly insecure and clingy and desperate for the few scraps of his attention he happens to toss in her direction - ironically enough, just about exactly the sort of pathetically needy empty shell that the hottest guy in class manipulates girls into becoming when he’s cast as a villain instead of a supposed hero. And she’s betrayed at virtually every turn - by the hot boyfriend, by the rival, even by the hot boyfriend’s imouto - and she just lets it slide, as if she has no other option - as if she didn’t just spend years specifically subject to the lasting trauma from being betrayed.

When it wasn’t disappointing, it was revolting.

Seriously, if it keeps up this level of quality, this is going to be one of the all-time greats. It’s incredibly well-written, but that’s not even close to all - everything about it is top-quality. The OP and the ED are both terrific (and I didn’t put together the first time through that the OP is the same song that Asa is singing in the kitchen in the first scene), as is the incidental music throughout. The characters are great, and not just Asa and Makio - the few we’ve met so far have all been impressive (Daigo especially). The art is great too - I especially love the recurring sort of surreal bits of symbolism, like the desert and the exotic marketplace with familiar people speaking a language she can’t understand. (The scene where Asa is staring at the blank page in her journal and the lines slowly morph into waves of sand in her desert was particularly brilliant). It’s just one of those incredibly rare anime with seemingly no faults.

Technically, it was at least sufficient and often quite good, but the writing and the pacing just weren’t quite what they should’ve and could’ve been. It was sort of odd, because it kept feeling like it was just about to be phenomenal, but then it just wouldn’t quite make it. It’s deeply allegorical, with lots of symbolism, but it’s too rushed in too many places. It needed to take a bit more time and provide fuller context so that the symbolism would land effectively. And a lot of the situations came off feeling contrived, again because it was too rushed. Rather than slowly building a situation so that it made sense in-universe, it would just sort of plunk the characters down in whatever situation was necessary to tell the next bit of the story and sort of handwave the context. It was still good and I liked it all in all - all of the technical aspects of it were at least acceptable and often quite good, and the characters were well-developed and interesting - but it was sort of frustrating and disappointing, because I could feel how much better it could’ve been with a bit more attention and a bit more breathing room.

It’s a sort of hackneyed ‘kids with superpowers’ scenario, but played in an unexpected and intriguing way. It had a few distractingly obvious flaws though. First, the smart guy who’s closing in on the solution to the mystery was handwaved into still not quite getting it by correctly analyzing things right up to a point, then obviously in order to maintain the mystery longer, he’d spontaneously decide that maybe he was just kidding himself, or that it couldn’t possibly be what it so obviously was, or whatever served to make him just drop it entirely. And second, Nana, who’s supposedly an even more brilliant strategist and analyst, couldn’t manage to work out the basic truth about her own situation, in spite of the fact that it was plainly obvious pretty much from the first episode, and in spite of the fact that her continued failure to figure it out led to extremely significant consequences. And that was a constant through most of the series - she was too smart to have allowed herself to get in that situation in the first place and he was too smart to have not figured out what was going on, but the series required the situation to continue, so it did anyway, unsatisfyingly. And like Irodoku, it was still okay, but it just could’ve been so much better.