Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai - Episode 1

Despite what it's title (English translation: My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute) might suggest and no matter what knee-jerk reactions have come from certain individuals, the male protagonist of Ore no Imouto ga Konnani Kawaii Wake ga Nai, Kyou Kosaka, doesn't actually find his little sister cute at all.  In fact, she's a pain in the ass - successful and over-achieving, doted on by her parents, and completely uninterested in what her brother says or does.

Given Kirino's success and popularity, Kyou is more than a little bemused when he ends up finding an anime DVD in the hallway of the family home after accidentally bumping into his sister, and any confusion becomes even more intense when he finds an 18-rated eroge inside said DVD case.  Surely it can't belong to anyone in his family?  After feeling out his parents and getting the expected answer, it appears that there can only be one culprit, and lo and behold before he knows it Kirino has all but confessed to owning said product.

What Kyou isn't expecting however is that his sister is in fact a massive otaku, with a huge hidden stash which she drags him out of bed to show him in the dead of night.  Even worse, her obsession is with eroge involving little sisters who love their brother, although thankfully for her brother Kirino's interest is more in the little sisters and how cute they are themselves.  So, before he knows it Kyou is dragged into Kirino's rather odd little world, setting the scene for the series to come.

It's a wonder Kirino's hobby wasn't discovered from the amount of time she must have spent downloading patches for 0verflow games...

As opening episodes go, this actually turned out to be a pretty decent affair - nothing spectacular or ground-breaking, but a solid introduction to the story that went out of its way (almost too far out of its way) to point out that there's absolutely nothing incestuous whatsoever in the relationship between Kirino and Kyou.  Instead, the brother/sister angle is played off reasonably well, with the kind of vague disinterest and irritation you might expect to see between siblings, disturbed only by Kyou's discovery about his sister's hobbies.  Of course, it's Kirino herself who is really designed to appeal to the otaku crowd; not only as some kind of "ideal otaku girlfriend", but also as a mirror to the dilemma of many an anime fan who would love nothing better than like-minded people to share their interests with but, only to find that such individuals are hard to come by.  It's tough to have a hobby that you can't be open about, in short.

This particular premise almost sets the show up as a bit of a Genshiken wannabe, and although I can't see it reaching anything like those heights there is room for some decent comedy and a story that we can all feel some familiarity with - for a first episode, it was certainly neither "shit" nor "pathetic", that's for sure.