"Clean Freak! Aoyama-Kun" and Sports Anime

I Usually Love Me Some Sports Anime...But Not Today

I’m a real sucker for sports anime. The passion, the hope, the angst. It’s usually fun, but for some reason this one just wasn’t cutting it for me.

If you asked me what genre of anime I mostly enjoy, I would lie and say shonen, followed by the forced confession of slice-of-life, and then a slow realization that I actually love sports anime.

Which, I guess you could argue falls into a subcategory of shonen, just without the high fantasy and super special interesting powers that style of protagonist tends to boast.

I’m fucking DEAD I completely forgot about Bobobo until I saw this image. It unlocked some unpleasant though comedic memories for me.

For me, sports anime is a mix of the two former genres I mentioned, with the added spice of high school athletics drama. Which I can relate to because I went to high school, but is a fantasy world because I did not do athletics. Or exercise.

Though I tried and failed and wound up participating in freshmen events as a senior. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Clean Freak! Aoyama-Kun is, you guessed it, a high school boy who suffers from mysophobia, also known as germophobia and is an absolute clean freak (duh doi), but loves soccer as a sport.

The irony being that soccer is high contact and dirty, the mud often flying over and covering every inch of every player. Also sweat tends to fly off in glittering cascades in the animation which is beautiful but also gross in a sticky kind of way so I don’t blame the protagonist for being disgusted.

Add as much shine as you want, that’s still disgusting as all be to me. Maybe the pandemic’s changed me. Maybe I’ve changed me.

Aoyama is efficient at the sport and ridiculously overpowered in skill level compared to the other players, and it is later revealed that he actually only chose to go to Fujimi High School because the uniforms are white and clean looking, in no way caring about the performance of the team, which isn’t exactly in line with his love and appreciation for the sport.

Fun, quirky, has some interesting side characters, but overall is not my cup of tea.

I came for the high school angst of playing with the boys and trying to make your dreams come true on the evergreen field with two goal posts before it’s too late.

I came to see the sports action and while there are some pretty cool soccer moves to dull this throbbing desire, the short series veers far off into other characters and nonsense that sometimes you forget that it is a sports anime.

This Giga-Chad showed up quite a lot and flashed his abs at Aoyama-Kun. For critique or for approval I don’t really know and we never really understand why.

I wanted to see how Aoyama overcame his fear of dirt to play the game he loves so much. I wanted to see how his soccer skills developed and whether he learned to trust and play with his teammates. I wanted Cross Game or Knight in the Area type of depth and this anime is not it.

That is completely totally fine. Because it feels more like a comedy, each episode a skit and a punchline that’s sometimes missed, but a fun one to watch in a lazy afternoon.

Watch This If:

1. You like sports anime (even if the sports shows up for only like half the episode. If that).

2. You like soccer (watching them run is exhausting to me and sometimes I gotta take a stretch. You should stretch too. Give them muscles something to feel after watching anime for 8 hours straight. Go on).

3. You like comedy and silly characters (the purest definition of this show I can faithfully give to you).

4. You enjoy funky little asides that take up entire episodes.

5. You’re missing Haikyuu! and really need a pick-me-up to fill the void.

Don’t Watch This If:

1. You want to see a good sports anime that

   • Develops characters

   • Plays the damn sport

   • Showcases familiar themes of found family, overcoming the odds, growing together, escapism, etc. etc.

2. Perfect, emotionless protagonists bore the everloving boogers out of you.

3. You want complex and compelling storylines interwoven into the narrative of the high school sport that really serves as a metaphor for life and growing up.

4. You don’t like laughing or being happy, even if for just a little bit.

5. You’re missing Haikyuu! and really need a pick-me-up to fill the void.

[Woah there cowboy! Looks like we got some great anime newsletters on: Given, Little Witch Academia, Sk8 The Infinity, and Erased stored in our lil’ ole archives. Also some newsletters on animation which is similar but different ehhh yeah: The House, Encanto (which comes with a Podcast! Yummy!), The Summit of the Gods, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.]

HOWEVER:

This is a short and sweet anime to binge or maybe play in the background while you indulge in other activities or attempt to multitask, and hey, maybe the manga explains Aoyama and his silly teammates much better than this 12-episode anime could.

All in all, fun, kind of stupid, not very memorable, but with some awkward laughter that you can try to keep from bubbling out, but will make its way forward no matter what~

A good depiction of what Aoyama does after every game.