In Love With a Goddess
Back in the day, as everyone knows, everything was better. The music. The weather. The food. The love. And of course television, too. These days it’s nothing but crap. But were anime better back then as well? You might think so. Sailor Moon. Cowboy Bebop. Neon Genesis Evangelion. All classics from that era that still convince today through their likable characters, their great stories, or simply their sheer epic scale.
Oh! My Goddess is without a doubt a classic. The anime released in 2005, based on a manga, is still celebrated decades later as one of the most popular animated series from the Land of the Rising Sun. Likable characters? Definitely! A great story? Uh, well… if you want to call it that. Sheer epicness? Eh.
So what’s it about? Keiichi Morisato is a second-year college student who accidentally calls the Technical Goddess Hotline. The goddess Belldandy appears and informs him that her agency has received a system request from him and that she is supposed to grant him a single wish. Believing someone is playing a prank on him, he wishes that she would stay with him forever. And his wish is granted.
Since he cannot live with Belldandy in his all-male dormitory, they are forced to look for alternative accommodation and eventually find shelter in an old Buddhist temple.
They are allowed to stay there indefinitely because the monk who lives there has gone on a pilgrimage to India after being impressed by Belldandy’s innate kindness. Keiichi’s life with Belldandy becomes even more hectic when her older sister Urd and her younger sister Skuld also move in. A series of adventures follows as his relationship with Belldandy develops.
There’s a reason anime series today are no longer made the way they were back then. And that reason is: lack of ideas. Keiichi is the typical shy, run-of-the-mill Japanese loser who gets nosebleeds just from seeing two cloud formations shaped like breasts. Belldandy is perfect. Period. And all the other characters are… there.
In Oh! My Goddess, 26 episodes attempt to connect the creative beginning with the emotional ending. What happens in between is completely irrelevant. While the creators initially tried to portray the unusual situation Keiichi finds himself in after his wish—sometimes humorously, sometimes sadly—the stories become increasingly absurd over time. And not in a good way.
By the midpoint of the series at the latest, it’s basically just random goddesses and demonesses insulting each other. Then suddenly they’re racing cars, unleashing robots on one another, and eventually something explodes while a pseudo-homosexual motorcycle club cheers. The end. Next episode. The same thing again. And if they only had about three yen of budget left for an episode, then it takes place entirely inside a house. Occasionally you see the garden. Wow.
Some episodes aren’t worth the celluloid they were recorded on. The intro plays, then shortly afterward the credits roll, and you’re left wondering: what actually happened there? Did anything happen at all? The little goddess and her older sister had an argument and Keiichi fell down. That’s it. The theme song was the best part of the episode.
Oh! My Goddess is the perfect background-watch adventure. It has the charm of an Kids’ WB anime series, the kind where you just drift from episode to episode and it didn’t matter if you missed one because you actually got up and went to play soccer with your friends.
Basically, you can watch the first five and the last five episodes of Oh! My Goddess and you won’t have missed anything. And if you find yourself wondering what relevance some previously unseen character has? The answer is always: none. They just suddenly appeared. And cause trouble. That’s all.
Oh! My Goddess would have been a better series if it had simply focused on the relationship between Keiichi and Belldandy. And whoever suggested that it would be funny if Belldandy’s entire family gradually showed up should have been fired on the spot before they even finished the sentence. Back then everything was better. Except Oh! My Goddess.