The moe in this one is less about high school girls and more about toddlers. And our main character is actually a dude, which makes this a rather unusual piece of moe shit, but there’s not much plot beyond slice-of-life and there’s little to nothing by way of character arcs, so I feel very comfortable in calling this moe shit.
So our main duo, high schooler Ryuichi and preschooler Kotaro, are conveniently orphaned by the plot and are taken in by the chairwoman of a private academy who makes Ryuichi earn his keep by watching a bunch of the teacher’s kids as part of the “Babysitting Club.”
Now, I’m a soulless monster who doesn’t like kids. Theoretically I like babies — like, other people’s babies who go away before too long — but toddlers are right out. Probably even laid-back toddlers like Kotaro is supposed to be. So it’s a backhanded sort of endorsement that I did not find these fictional toddlers either too annoyingly saccharine or annoyingly implausible.
Some of the side characters are one-trick ponies who aren’t really worth the plot making an effort to include them once their schtick is up. Or their schtick isn’t that funny.
There’s a guy in Ryuichi’s grade who’s fallen in love with one of the teachers and claims her kid as his “future daughter.” Except that teacher’s not a single mother, it’s just that her husband is an archaeologist who mostly works overseas. The joke should stop there, but the show insists on keeping it running, so it comes off as creepy and no-longer-funny. It was kinda charming in an awkward way when you thought this guy was just too earnest rather than delusional, but after a certain point I was half-expecting him to kidnap the baby or some shit, and that is not what I want for my happy-nice-time watching.
Luckily there is some decent humor in this to distract from off-key notes like this, and side characters who aren’t gross.
Like another classmate, a girl with a crush on Ryuichi, who wants to be good with kids but sucks at it. I kinda relate to her, but I’ve had more time to come to grips with the fact that I am crap with kids and nothing’s really gonna change that.
After being low-key terrorized by the kids being the gross little horrors that they are, Ryuichi makes her feel better by telling her that he doesn’t like gross things either, but that he puts up with it because the kids aren’t just a faceless mass of snot and bugs to him, they’re Taka and Kirin and Takuma and Kazuma.
Which is very happy nice time-making, but my mileage has varied considerably on that theory in regards to kids. Pets, yeah, I can apply that to, so the sentiment isn’t entirely lost on me.
Blarg on the Internet 