Another kind-of recent show for this project. I have many more shows planned here; some I’ve watched and covered before, and some I’ll be watching for the first time.
Circumstance brought me to this show…okay, so maybe it was that video from Giggsuk that did it – I’ll just get that out of the way here and now. What I try to do when it comes to watching shows and making opinions of them is not to always be so binary, and sadly that was the vibe I got from watching his video “Anime Has Gone Too Far“. In the video, he talks about how the anime medium reaches out to all sorts of people, but questions whether a show like My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog should be made. I’m bringing him up because I think he neglected to mention that there is a definite market for shows like this. A corner where there are anime fans who really enjoy not just ecchi shows, but shows that give off voyeuristic vibes. I will say though that the title of Gigguk’s video couldn’t be more aptly named; ecchi shows in particular are always trying to push the boundaries of what can make regular TV syndication. What can be shown without blurred fog, soap, or black lines? And so what about zoophilia? I mean it isn’t like it’s a topic that hasn’t really been covered already in the past.
Isekai is a genre that doesn’t seem to want to die, and so plots end up seemingly trying to outdo each other with creating wilder stories. From being transported and trapped into a virtual game world (Sword Art Online), to being killed and reincarnated into a high fantasy world full of magic and mystery (too many shows to count here…). From collapsing under books in a library and teaching the new world how to read and write (Ascendance of a Bookworm), to waking up as a vending machine after being crushed by one themselves (Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon). The plot idea of no longer being a loser in real life and turning into someone people respect in another world is nothing new; it just seems to have gained more traction in anime, manga and light novels as of late.
And so if this loser in real life turns into a dog, what happens then? Do we delve into the struggles of being reborn in another body (like something you’d see in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis)? The psychological damage being a four-legged creature does to someone who may have had a very normal life in the past? No. Instead the show leans toward how much this loser’s new owner fawns over him…a lot.
(This post contains spoilers for My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog.)
Let’s start from the very beginning. One cold and rainy afternoon, someone wakes up in the street. Who is he? And how did he get there? Well as we very quickly discover, those questions do not matter, as he is found by his classmate and crush Karen Inukai, who takes him home and adopts him. And it’s then when it dawns on him that he has been transformed/reincarnated into an Akita Inu puppy dog. It no longer matters what his name is, what kind of loser he was in class, who his human family is, and so on. What matters is the here and now, and I actually find that a very different take in isekai shows. So many have backstories of who these nobodies were before Truck-kun hits them, which sort of serves into the idea of ‘people who were nobodies can be better in completely new worlds/environments’. But with isekai stories getting wilder and wilder as time goes on, it was almost inevitable that a human-to-dog story would come…
There is the age old ‘3 episode rule’ that so many of us like to follow – to determine whether shows are worth our time or not. Well with each one of the 12 episodes (plus 2 OVAs) being around 12 minutes long (including the OP and ED themes), we don’t get that long to find out if the show suits our tastes. Right from the first episode, we get to see Karen’s hidden fetish. The former human/now dog saw her as the cold ice queen in his class – someone that no one could have. And so when after a shared bath and dinner, she offers him her hand to shake, he considers the fact that that would be something the human him could never do. Even though the show’s dialogue contains a lot of him finding a way to turn human again somehow, he realizes that the one person he had a crush on in class is showering him with love and kisses…while he is a dog.
Karen may be the titular character here, but the problem here is that we see no real personality in her that isn’t centered around Pochita. She may be portrayed as the classroom beauty, but she is cold and mean to pretty much everyone around her, including her own mother. Her life now revolves around Pochita, whether it be walking him, taking pictures of him peeing in the street, bathing with him, giving him both direct and indirect kisses, and much much more. She puts Pochita before everyone and everything else, including herself. Through research, I discovered the Japanese term ‘Hadaka no Tsukiai’, which roughly translates as skinship; the idea of spending quality time with loved ones naked. This obviously serves well for bathhouses, saunas and onsen hot springs in Japan, and while the term is used far more in platonic relationships than sexual ones, I can’t help but think that that term has just been completely thrown out the window in this show.
Two more girls are added to the show later on; Karen’s neighbor Mike who has a phobia of dogs, and Usagi who, as we discover later on, has a connection with Pochita when he was human. While a short show like this could have been all fine and well with just a minimal number of characters (Pochita, Karen, and Karen’s mother), adding more characters who have their own personalities like this is fine…providing they are characters we grow to enjoy watching onscreen. Karen’s personality (of lack of one) is already jarring, but the fact that there is so little to write home about when it comes to both Mike and Usagi just makes this worse.
You want me to be perfectly honest? Fine. I was okay with this show having 12 minute episodes; full-length ones would have just made this car crash even cringey to watch. And I would have been fine with just having 3 characters appear, instead of adding secondary ones. Less can be more sometimes, and so despite all the mind-numbing zoophilia fetishes we see in each episode, a more understandable connection could be seen between Karen and Pochita. Am I actually crazy in thinking that, especially considering how much hate and backlash this show received by both critics and the public? Or maybe I’m just looking too deeply into what is essentially an ecchi show that perhaps really has gone too far, just as Giggsuk said.
Now we can go on for ages on how a show about a zoophile high-school girl who wants to be in a close relationship with a stray dog she found on the street, but is that really the only stand-out weird thing here? Watching this actually makes me think of World’s End Harem, and let me explain why. To those who don’t know, World’s End Harem is another ecchi/hentai show that was somehow able to make it to Japanese TV and western streaming platforms. It tells the story of a global pandemic that only affects the male population, and how the surviving males (who wake up from cryosleep) have to re-populate the planet. The anime adaptation tried way too hard on creating a serious science-fiction story, but it ultimately turned into one over-long horny mess.
Towards the end of that show, we later discover that there is a secret government plan that wants to look into females not requiring males to get pregnant, making the male survivors’ lives meaningless. But when the show ends, there is no happy ending…and there is no bad ending either. We are left with a heavy mystery that we didn’t really ask for. And that’s the same vibe I got with My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog. We don’t really get a definitive conclusion on how Pochita became a dog. It just turned weird when mystery was added into the story, and how Pochita wanted desperately to be human again. And so unless they are pushing for a second season (which is very possible), us anime-only folk may never know. We would just need to look hard into the manga to find the answer to that question.
The fact that this show tries really hard to have a plot is just another thing to add to the list of things that people will be put off for here. I mentioned World’s End Harem already (which was in a similar dilemma), but while that show focused a lot about actual sex and how it was critical for the show’s story, there could have been so many other ways that My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog could have gone.
To summarize here, I think that we need to remember that there is a definite audience for this kind of degeneracy. Ecchi on this level is becoming more and more mainstream in shows, and something like My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog proves it. From what could have been a school slice-of-life comedy about a guy becoming a slave to a girl he has a crush on is taken almost literally when isekai is introduced and we get to see class darling Karen show her inner zoophile tendencies. Outside of all this, after the opening episodes, this becomes a car-crash of a show. We stop thinking about how Pochita got there, and more about when the last episode is. Jokes stop being funny, the mystery of Pochita’s transformation evaporates and the focus is pretty much solely on how these three girls want to…well…you know the rest.
Everyone has told me to hate this show; I personally think that this is just an ecchi show that perhaps should never have been adapted. My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog could have stayed as a manga that its fans could stick with, and that would maybe have been just fine. But now the mangaka Itsutsuse has this mess looming over them for the rest of their career. Granted that they were creating a manga full-to-the-brim with zoophilia and girls with a few screws loose anyway, but I turn to the studio who adapted this (Quad) and I ask them why they felt this needed to be adapted into a show for regular TV syndication. I will probably never get that answer, and I don’t think anyone will, for that matter.
My Life as Inukai-san’s Dog is available to watch on HIDIVE.
Anime Solstice 