The first rule of Meganebu is to be absolutely ridiculous.
The President of the Glasses Club is a simple man with simple desires: in order to get his school to recognize the amazing power of glasses, he dreams of creating an actual pair of “x-ray” glasses that let a person see through someone’s clothes. When he finds out that the school’s annual vision check-up is tomorrow, he gets the rest of his club–composed of The Cool Stoic One, The Sleepy One that Likes Sweets, and Two Shotas–to kick their development into overdrive, since obviously a hot chick will come to administer the test. If they are ever going to prove that their project is a success and get their clubroom and funding back, now is the time!
The club certainly lives up to its name, and the show goes to great lengths to make sure that you don’t forget that the point is glasses. If I wasn’t already aware that its source material is a drama CD, my guess would be that it comes from a four-koma, since even within the same scene it feels like it’s deliberately set up for mini-punchlines, mostly revolving around glasses. The plotline is glasses. Their character designs mainly show off their glasses. They make a pose that looks like a glasses frame. The reason for their existence is glasses–ok, you get the point.
But that’s one of the reasons why I’m a bit concerned about this show, since there can’t be that many silly plotlines and puns revolving around glasses to fill an entire season. I could be wrong, but I didn’t find the jokes they were playing so hard that amusing either. The one time the show got a legitimate laugh out of me was when the President ran all the way up to the eye chart when asked to move close enough to be able to see it. The rest of it was either a bit too silly (“I WILL REDUCE WIND RESISTANCE BY TAKING OFF MY SHIRT”) or just fell flat (the shotas arguing).
But what stuck out far more than the increasingly silly plot and jokes was the visual style. It runs through the whole spectrum from “Wow, that’s an interesting style choice for this scene” to “Who was responsible for the colors on this, my eyes are bleeding.” There’s an undeniable visual flair to this that I definitely like, but I wish that it would hold off a bit on all the neon. On the audio side of things, the background music that constantly announces the name of the show in the same way an FM radio station lets you know what frequency you’re on is the funniest stuff I’ve heard in a while.
Overall, I think that Meganebu will live or die based on whether it will be able to keep up with the wacky visuals and silly glasses puns. There’s also a definite fujoshi fodder angle to this, but aside from the suddenly shirtless scene and the part at the beginning where one of the shotas was hanging all over the president, it doesn’t seem to be going after that angle as much as I thought it would. There’s potential here for an entertaining bit of nonsense, and I hope that Meganebu can pull that off.
This series is streaming on Crunchyroll.
