Upotte!! First Impressions – Make sure to keep your trigger clean and well maintained

Well, the first episode of Upotte was a curious experience and one I went into with a certain amount of dread, not entirely sure what to expect from a series with such an outlandish concept as this. Seishou Academy is a school full of quite unique girls – they are all anthropomorphized guns that attend the school in order to grow up to be an excellent assault rifle. A new homeroom teacher is arriving, and he is about to get a crash course on how much fun, madness and insanity a school for guns can be.

 

Such a premise begs the questions, what on earth were the people who came up with it thinking? Are they mad? Are the insane? And the answer to those questions is probably yes, but more important, thank god because the first episode was great and incredibly funny. Seeing all the girls go to school to learn how to be good guns and grow up to be the best assault rifle that they can possibly be, all the while practicing with guns is both warped, funny and simply off the wall. Seeing girls fantasies about big strong hands holding their stock and pressing down on their triggers was a sight to behold. And it is this mix of cute, perverted and dark humor that made this first episode so much fun to watch. Furthermore, the dark side to this story is not glossed over, with the destructive power and danger of guns on full display.

The concept lends itself to almost unimaginable amounts of innuendo and toilet humor, and its great humor, with loads of suggestion and excellent gags. That all our main girls are different kinds of assault rifles is one thing, but when you start going over what parts of their body equate different parts of a gun it starts to get a bit outlandish. It is the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle suggestions that helped to make this episode hilarious all the way through.

 

The fantasies of Funko-chan, aka Belgium made FNC were particularly entertaining, with numerous mentions of her thong underwear, apparently because she only has a skeleton stock.  The amount that can fantasizes about seems endless, with lines like ‘I’d fire so fast with those big strong hands gripping me’ giving all a clear idea as to what this show is about. There are a few jokes at the beginning about various country stereotypes, and of course a few more at the end, but while they are quite funny, they don’t hold a candle to everything else.

If anything, the one major flaw is that this show may be too outlandish for many people. The idea that cute girls can be guns, while also firing guns that may, or may not be themselves is just weird. This shows approach to common sense and logic is to throw it out of the window and then see how many bullets can be landed before they hit the ground. It simply does not care, and I am currently loving it for that. Any show that can have as much, if not more innuendo than Aquarion EVOL is a classic in my book. Of course, this show is neither original, but it is unique, and its sense of humor is truly in the gutter, yet if you cannot enjoy a good piece of innuendo and toilet humour then you might want to reassess certain elements of your life.