Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ Niea_7 ( Chapter 8 )

Japan treats aliens like any other spirit-monster that's basically harmless. They let them get jobs as waiters and other common tasks. If they don't know amazing useful technology or have awesome powers, then they're just people, aren't they? Niea_7 is that kind of setting. After the initial crash-landing by aliens, the impact area is mostly turned into a convenient dumping ground for trash, and the aliens filter into Japan as just enough ethnic group. Niea_7 herself is an energetic alien with no antenna and lives in the closet of a cram student studying for her college entrance exams as a renter of her former home, a bathhouse in Enohana Japan, a suburb of Tokyo. She is very poor, and her goals in college are murky, outcomes after college gradually revealled in the course of the show. It is a comedy anime, but the sad kind of comedy with a distinctly Japanese take on the futulity of effort in Abe's Japan after the economic crash of 89. Why try? You will only fail. This is the theme of the series. Every effort made, no matter how well-meaning, leads to failure for the bathhouse. The main character is so poor that a boy she used to read to as a child is literally bringing her 100 pounds of rice every month, to keep her alive. He wants her as his wife. He loves her, though he's not good at showing it beyond the extremely obvious gift of life. But the girl is ambitious, wanting more than just being a wife, more than just surviving in a failing economy. She believes that college will set her free. Of course, the counterpoint is the manager of the bathhouse, fresh from gaining her MBA (Masters in Busiiness Administration), and all set to turn this tiny struggling business into a financial success. With all her knowledge and energy does she succeed? No. Not even a little. Every effort is failure. So why go to college in the first place? What is the value? 

The great thing about this show is it is over 20 years old, and the message is still just as true today as it was then, even if people couldn't believe it. Today, people with college degrees are waiters, quick mart cashiers, and other menial jobs on minimum wage, suffering under student loan debt they chose to take because their dumb parents told them to go to college because that will work out, you'll see. Niea_7 proves the opposite and would have been an apt warning if any of the modern generations had seen it. Pity.