Seitokai no Ichizon - Episode 5

It's summer in the world of the student council depicted here this week, which makes for a rather un-seasonal instalment of swimsuits and.... err... more swimsuits for Seitokai no Ichizon's fifth instalment.


Of course, anime rarely needs much in the way of an excuse to break out the swimsuits, and so the reasoning here is just that it's hot, pure and simple, meaning the summer uniforms are soon replaced by even skimpier outfits. With Ken and his multitude of harem fantasies on the council however, this proves to be something of a problem for the girls, and so our unfortunate male protagonist has to put up with an episode of either wearing a booby-trapped blindfold or being chained inside a locker. Well, I say unfortunate, but to be honest he deserves everything he gets - Sugisaki's spiel wore thin a couple of episodes ago, and by this point it's actually becoming eye-rollingly irritating, so he deserves everything he gets if you ask me. Of course, this episode again tries to "come good" towards the end with some supposedly touching scenes between Ken and Minatsu, but it's a transparent attempt to deflect from an episode that was all about the fan service first and foremost.

That aside, there wasn't a great deal to talk about here on the humour front either - Sugisaki and Sakurano had a couple of mildly amusing exchanges, and I got a slight kick out of the (admittedly cheap) Toradora reference (which was about the only one I "got" this time around I think), but otherwise we were left with a rather barren and joke-free wasteland once again, with any attempts at raising a laugh postponed in deference to a bit of cheap titillation. As per a number of episodes of this series thus far, there simply isn't a high enough joke to time ratio to make Seitokai no Ichizon a series worthy of recommendation - Indeed, if anything it's actually becoming harder to like by the week, occasional flahses of improvement aside.