Monster Musume: Everyday Life with Monster Girls (Review)

Monster Musume Puts a Hell of a Twist on Harem Anime.

I’m sure all fans of anime have discovered that there’s some pretty weird and overtly sexual series out there, but Monster Musume took all of that to a whole new level for me. Just from the full title (Monster Musume: Everyday Life with Monster Girls) it’s easy to tell that this is going to be another harem anime. There’s a bit of a twist to this one though. While the protagonist is your typical teenage boy, the women are all exchange students from the monster world. That means we have a lot of gals with pretty faces and totally normal torsos, but all of them have animal lower halves (or limbs). I don’t want to kink shame anyone, but the series raised a lot of questions for me, most of them anatomical in nature.

I will admit that Harem anime are my guilty pleasure. I know that they’re incredibly sexists and nothing more than a teenager’s wet dream, but there’s just something about the balls to the walls craziness at the core of their plots that delights me. Monster Musume though blows series like Demon King Daimao and Is this a Zombie out of the water. The series shamelessly abandons innuendos and is simply straight-up sexual half the time. Hell, it might even be one of the most sexual series I’ve ever seen (then again, I did watch Seven Mortal Sins…). Like so many harem series, there are plenty of ridiculous scenarios that end with girls tops miraculously coming off or gratuitous panty shots. However, Monster Musume takes things a lot further than that to a point where I honestly felt like I was watching softcore porn at certain points. Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that (other than the fact that it’s often used as a substitute for things like plot and character development), but given the fact that these are monster girls, I found myself a little uncomfortable initially with some of the raunchier moments. 

So, here’s the thing. Kimihito Kurusu (Bryson Baugus) is a totally normal human being. The girls of the series though are centaurs, harpies, lamias, mermaids, etc. Now most of them fall into typical harem archetypes. The primary beautiful heroine obsessed with the hero (Allison L. Sumrall), the cute bordering on underage cute girl (Brittney Karbowski), the buxom woman with an uptight and serious attitude (Molly Searcy), and so on. The thing is that their lover bodies are animal in nature. For example, the female lead has the lower body of a snake. So, when things get hot and heavy, I find myself distracted trying to figure out where things are going to go from here. I mean, she has snake genitalia and even if they found a way around that, don’t snakes lay eggs for the most part? I imagine any children they have would be deformed and in agonizing pain constantly moaning, “kill me…” Needless to say, these questions were pretty distracting, but at the same time added to the uproarious absurdity of Monster Musume. Still, it’s clear this is an anime designed to satisfy a very specific fetish out there when all is said and done.

That’s really my biggest problem with Monster Musume. The series itself features some great animation from Lerche and Seva, with vivid colors and careful attention paid to line weight to add depth to the scenes. There’s also a lot of attention paid to a lot of traditional tropes of harem anime, so there are plenty of bouncing boobs and sticky liquids. That said, I enjoyed just how devoted the series was too filling female archetype roles while still putting enough of a twist on the characters and their designs to keep them from being boring. In the end, there’s plenty of good to help even out the weird and I actually enjoyed watching Monster Musume, even though I knew it was trash.

Oddly enough, I found myself much more enthralled with a subplot involving a group of monster girls working as counter-terrorism/ law enforcement officers. The characters in that group seemed a lot less desperate to be sexualized and like they had the potential to have some pretty fun adventures. The series gives you a bit of a taste of Mrs. Smith (Shelley Calene-Black) and her teams, but I found myself loving everything about them. Not sure if there are any plans to expand on their misadventures, but I would love to see a spin-off.

Despite some of my “concerns” when it came to Monster Musume, I was actually more disappointed in how short it was. At only 12-episodes, it felt as though there was so much more that could have been done just when I was starting to get over the Beastiality theme of the series. There’s also never a clear resolution to anything that happens in the series, which is both a pro and a con. On the one hand, it keeps Monster Musume light and proves that the minds behind it aren’t taking it too seriously. On the other, it means that it leaves you a bit unsatisfied. So, if you’re looking for a weird, overtly sexual, and bizarre series, I think you might find Monster Musume to be just what you ordered.