Episode 12 – The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made

What makes a series “The Worst Anime Ever”? It’s a question I’ve found myself asking an awful lot, lately. Now, contrary to what some of you might be thinking after the shenanigans we’ve gotten into watching The Fruit of Evolution these past few months, I don’t actually like reviewing terrible stuff. I’ve never met a critic who does. Sure, every now and then it’s fun to get together and riff on the glaringly terrible choices that such-and-such show will make, but on the whole, I go into everything that I cover hoping that it will be good. This is especially true when television is concerned, since a bad movie is over and done with in a single sitting, but a crappy TV show can shamble on for months before someone finally puts it out of its (and its audience’s) misery.

I’ve made no secret of how I feel about The Fruit of Evolution. It’s terribleness has been obvious from its very first episode. You don’t see as sorry a product as that and expect it to suddenly get better; it could only ever get worse from there, and good Lord, did it get worse. This all brings me back to the question that’s been turning around in my head ever since I finished “Before I Knew It, It’s the Final Episode!?” I’ve watched some goddamned awful anime in my day, but I’m far from the world’s foremost authority on Bad Anime (or anything else, for that matter). Even now, after all of the suffering we’ve been through, I can’t definitively claim that The Fruit of Evolution is the “Worst Anime of All Time”…but if I rely on my own personal misfortune and trauma, I can once again resort to infallible, peer-reviewed methodology of…

If you’d asked me just weeks ago what my least favorite anime ever was, I’d almost certainly have named Hand Shakers. It is still without a doubt the ugliest piece of animation that has ever burned its imagery onto my retinas, and to its credit, The Fruit of Evolution never put me in the literal physical pain that Hand Shakers‘ motion-sickness inducing camera work caused. Then again, every one of Hand Shakers‘ artistic blunders was the result of choices made by a team of very talented and skilled artists. The show might look like dog vomit, but it’s the kind of dog vomit that takes hard work and a real (if utterly misguided) artistic vision to spit up.

I defy any person to watch the finale of The Fruit of Evolution and determine whether there was any vision behind the show’s sloppy and cheap visuals. The show is so devoid of creative passion and style that your eyes are constantly forced to wander around and notice all of the inconsistent character models and glaring continuity errors that just offer further proof of The Fruit of Evolution’s shameless mediocrity. It doesn’t make me ill to look at it, but it does make me kind of sad, which might be worse, in the end.

Winner (By Which I Mean Loser): Fruit of Evo

Big Order was an absolutely insane ten-car-pileup of nonsense writing mixed with weird fetishes and a complete misunderstanding of how “stories” work. It was one of the first garbage fire anime I ever reviewed, and it has a special place in my heart for making me go “What in the Merciful Fuck is happening!?” at least once every week. In that sense, you could argue that it has a “worse” story than Fruit of Evo, but you could also argue that’s only because Big Order is the only one of the two that even has a story to ruin.

One of my biggest complaints about the last quarter of Fruit of Evo‘s first season is how hard it was pushing its stupid “Defend the Kingdom from the Hordes of the Demon Lord” story. There has not been a single solitary second of this anime that has provided a character worth giving a damn about or a story beat worth paying attention to, and yet suddenly the whole season’s priorities shifted to setting up this big ol’ battle that would cap off the story arc. Then, in this finale, Seiichi just kills every single one of the S-Class boss monsters with this stupid “Judgement” spell that he pulls completely out of his ass, and this happens within the first three minutes of the episode. So, not only was all of that buildup a complete waste of time, but the rest of the episode has to have its characters stand around and literally waste time while they fill out the fifteen minutes needed to get to the end credits.

Both Big Order and Fruit of Evo shit the bed spectacularly in how they handle their “conclusions”, but at least I still remember the ways that Big Order failed itself into oblivion. The Fruit of Evo’s finale was a pathetic shrug and a bunch of lazy filler, not to mention one final useless scene with all of Seiichi’s classmates, who were so irrelevant throughout this season that I never even bothered to learn their names. Also, Fruit of Evo is longer than Big Order by two whole episodes, which means it stole forty more minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

Winner (By Which I Mean Loser): Fruit of Evo

I picked Yashahime to generally represent an anime that actively incorporates comedy into its story, though I’ll be the first to concede that Fruit of Evo is much more of a capital-C “Comedy” anime than Yashahime. I honestly don’t watch a lot of bad comedy past whatever I might have to to get through for Preview Guide, because like I said way back at the beginning of these reviews, there is no worse form of media than bad comedy (except for, you know, snuff films and Nazi propaganda and the like, but c’mon, you know what I mean).

The point is, for as much as I disliked Yashahime’s extremely irritating and juvenile attempts to make me laugh, it did get me at least once or twice. That Moroha is a crackup when she’s given the chance, I’ll tell you what. Fruit of Evo is not the first crappy comedy to fail at making me laugh even one time, but it is the first crappy comedy to fail at making me laugh even one time for twelve episodes in a row. Even in this finale, not a single joke landed.

There were two (2) moments that came within spitting distance of the general area code of being a recognizably functional almost-joke. The first was another one of those bits where Seiichi amasses an absurd amount of EXP from killing all those monsters and is overcome with despair over how inhumanly strong he’s become. If Fruit of Evo ever actually used that despair to create comedic conflict, or successfully juxtapose his high skill level with his terrible social skills, or did anything resembling a traditional setup and punchline, this might have worked as a gag. Unfortunately, Fruit of Evo has proven time and again that it either doesn’t understand how jokes work in the audio-visual medium of animation, or that it simply can’t be bothered to do them right out of spite. Either way, it isn’t funny.

Then there’s the ridiculous portrait of Seiichi that the puppy-girl painted for that contest I’m sure all of you forgot about. Go ahead and look at it up there in the corner. It’s patently awful, but it’s supposed to be really good and flattering within the universe of the show. I could not tell if this disconnect was intentional, or if the poor artist in charge of drawing it was too exhausted and underpaid to care. It almost made me crack a half-smile, either way, but the more I looked at it, the more keenly aware I became of how limited my time on this Earth is, and how any one of us could die from a brain aneurysm or random-onset heart failure at any moment. You know, the kind of dark thoughts that keep you up in the witching hours of the night. In that sense, it’s a good representative of the show as a whole.

Winner (By Which I Mean Loser): Fruit of Evo

So, there you have it. Is The Fruit of Evolution the absolute worst piece of crap ever animated and exported from the nation of Japan? Nah. Is it the worst thing that I, personally, have ever had to watch? In my current mood, at this very moment? I’d probably say that it is. My answer will probably change on any given Tuesday, and there will be even more bad anime to contend with in the future, undoubtedly. Some of them might even give this show a run for its money!

That said, I watched all twelve episodes of The Fruit of Evolution, and every second of it was miserable and boring and annoying, in equal measure. The show never really wanted to be anything else, but that doesn’t excuse its crimes. The job of a critic is to communicate how whatever they’re reviewing made them feel, and whether that experience was worthwhile in the end. Even now, at the end of it all, I can’t express those emotions with simple numbers. I’ll have to let my good friend Patrick take from here to close us out, once and for all:

Rating:

The Fruit of Evolution: Before I Knew It, My Life Had It Made is currently streaming on
Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.