“MM!”

Prac­ti­cal­ly every­one in this show has some kind of men­tal hangup, and that’s the focus of the series.

For the three main char­ac­ters, they all have full-grown psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­ders that con­flict and coop­er­ate at the same time. The male lead Tarou is a masochist, but only when women do the dam­age; Mio is a sadist and, in clas­sic ani­me style, is self-con­scious about her flat breasts; and Arashiko of the abun­dant breasts can­not stand being touched or even being around men and will even attack them if they get too close. There­fore, Tarou is in ecsta­sy when Mio or Arashiko hit him, and they do, a lot, as Mio gets inor­di­nate plea­sure from doing so where­as Arashiko does so when flus­tered or by acci­dent and is imme­di­ate­ly sorry.

Its also the run­ning joke, that Mio is always try­ing to find ways to ‘cure’ Tarou’s masochism (includ­ing an can­dle-lit exor­cism) that always wind up rein­forc­ing his masochism instead of cur­ing it. Of course, one of those ways involves hypnosis.

The rest of the cast all have their hangups as well: Tarou’s moth­er and teen-aged sis­ter are extreme­ly over­ly affec­tion­ate toward him (both want to mar­ry him) and even com­pete with each oth­er (and his girl­friends) for his affec­tions; Tarou’s friend Tat­su­kichi is a cross-dress­er (and quite good at it) and seems to have an alter­nate per­son­al­i­ty emerge when dress­ing as a woman; Noa, a senior, although her appear­ance is still that of a younger girl, is a genius who nev­er had a child­hood as she had to study all the time, and who always refers to her­self in third-per­son; Noa’s assis­tant Yuki­no­jō is a major loli­con (fan of pre­pu­bes­cent girls) and joined the Inven­tor’s Club to be clos­er to Noa; and school nurse Michiru knows all about every­one’s hangups, pos­sess­es an appar­ent­ly unlim­it­ed sup­ply of cos­play cos­tumes and loves to take pic­tures of the stu­dents in them.

Need­less to say, the entire series is NSFW.

His­to­ry: “MM!” was orig­i­nal­ly a series of light nov­els that were first trans­lat­ed into man­ga and then con­vert­ed to anime.

Anime

The ani­me is only 12 episodes long.

Episode #5

This episode intro­duces Noa, the Pres­i­dent of the Inven­tor’s Club, who dis­cov­ers (using a device that is sim­i­lar to the Saiyan bat­tle pow­er meter from “Drag­onBall”) that Tarou pos­sess­es an extreme amount of hen­tai (per­vert) ener­gy (30,000 points where­as the aver­age per­son has 5) and drains it to pow­er her hen­tai con­ver­sion machine. The pre­lim­i­nary effects are already affect­ing the high school: every stu­dents’ hid­den per­ver­sions are now on pub­lic dis­play: once the machine is at full pow­er, it will trans­form every­one on the Earth into per­verts, just so Noa would not feel alone.

How­ev­er, Yuki­no­jō does­n’t want that to hap­pen, and gives Tarou the Hen­tai Rid­er belt, which chan­nels his hen­tai ener­gy and trans­forms him into a super­hero. (Actu­al­ly, it trans­forms him into a Super Saiyin, com­plete with blond hair and glow­ing gold­en aura, anoth­er par­o­dy of the “DragonBall“  series.) But the belt isn’t enough, so he calls Mio (who was sick that day) and starts insult­ing her (lack of) breasts. Sud­den­ly she appears, kick­ing the door open, and starts hit­ting him. Recharged by Mio’s attacks, he is able to destroy Noa’s robot guardian by the pow­er of his “hen­tai” beam by call­ing out “HE-N-TA-I-HAAAA” in par­o­dy of Goku’s Kame­hame­ha beam attack.

With the guardian defeat­ed, Tarou is able to con­vince Nao to shut down the hen­tai machine by say­ing that he accept­ed her just as she was. But the machine can’t be shut down, so Tarou calls out to all the per­verts of the world, ask­ing them to lend him their per­vert ener­gy (anoth­er “Drag­onBall” par­o­dy bit) by which he can destroy the hen­tai machine and res­cue Noa. With­out the effects of the hen­tai machine, the school returns to nor­mal, with one addi­tion: Nao now rec­og­nizes Tarou as her first true love, although she announces it by appear­ing at club door inside a robot and dump­ing a load of lilac flow­ers (sym­bol­iz­ing true love) in the door­way. And she still refers to her­self in third person.

(The Hen­tai belt makes a re-appear­ance in episode #7.)

Episode #8

The episode opens with Mio attempt­ing to hyp­no­tize Tarou by swing­ing a 5‑Yen coin before his eyes. Arashiko exclaimed that she did­n’t know Mio knew hyp­no­sis, and Mio replied that she saw it on TV the pre­vi­ous night and prac­ticed it all night. It does­n’t seem to have any effect on Tarou until he instant­ly drops into trance. Tak­ing advan­tage of his sit­u­a­tion, Mio gives Tarou a post-hyp­not­ic sug­ges­tion to end his every state­ment with the phrase “Huge­tas­tic boobs!” which he obeys with­out under­stand­ing why upon awakening.

But that’s only the begin­ning: using hyp­no­sis, Mio attempts to cure Tarou’s masochism, which appear to work, until Noa inter­rupts the process, caus­ing Tarou to become enam­ored with her, becom­ing a loli­con. But that’s just the begin­ning: fur­ther attempts to reverse the pre­vi­ous only cause fur­ther per­ver­sions to emerge. After hug­ging Arashiko upon believ­ing him­self cured, and get­ting punched into the sky in return, he returns to Earth dressed as a Tuxe­do Mask cos­tume, minus pants (a Sailor Moon par­o­dy bit) and pro­ceeds to romance every girl he sees, exhib­int a vari­ety of fetish­es, and that includes sur­pris­ing the school nurse with a fetish for her legs, still in the Tuxe­do Mask costume.

Mio cap­tures Tarou and hyp­no­tizes him one last time, then tests him and dis­cov­ers that he is no longer a masochist. How­ev­er, Tarou instead becomes infat­u­at­ed with his friend Tat­su­kichi, the cross-dress­er. Mio first tries to arouse Tarou’s mas­cu­line sen­si­bil­i­ty by show­ing him a sexy Arashiko in a Play­boy bun­ny out­fit, but his only thoughts are how Tat­su­kichi would react. Mio’s solu­tion is to have Tat­su­kichi cross-dress, which brings out his female per­son­al­i­ty, but Tarou’s answer is a mag­i­cal girl trans­for­ma­tion of his own, with an empha­sis on “trans­for­ma­tion” and “girl”, Sailor Moon style. The nurse Michiru’s answer to the change is to start tak­ing his picture.

Final­ly, though Tarou is forced to accept him­self and the part of him­self that is masochis­tic, and all of the false fetish­es dis­ap­pear. He’s not cured, but at least he’s back to “nor­mal” again.

Com­men­tary: This episode demon­strates the prob­lem with ther­a­py that tries to resolve the appar­ent prob­lem with­out resolv­ing the under­ly­ing issues. Tarou’s par­ent prob­lem is his masochism but that is only the sur­face issue: when Mio hyp­no­tizes him and flat­ly tells him he is not masochis­tic, the unstat­ed under­ly­ing issue caus­es him to exhib­it a num­ber of oth­er fetish­es in com­pen­sa­tion. Only when he coun­ters the suc­ces­sion of hyp­not­ic sug­ges­tions and acknowl­edge his masochism does the oth­er fetish­es disappear.

Plus, there are more that a few hyp­not­ic stereo­types here:

• Famil­iar Focus: the 5‑Yen coin on a string is a com­mon induc­tion focus in ani­me. It is used because a) it is con­sid­ered “lucky” and b) it is the only coin with a hole in the cen­ter that can be used to tie a string to.
• Instant Expert: Mio saw hyp­no­sis on tele­vi­sion and was an overnight expert. Of course, that’s Mio in a nutshell.
• Its Not Work­ing, Its Not Work­ing, Its Not … (thud): Protes­ta­tions by the sub­ject that they aren’t going to be hyp­no­tized only mean they will be hyp­no­tized very soon.
• Don’t Try This At Home: Unpro­fes­sion­al use of ther­a­peu­tic hyp­no­sis only leads to more prob­lems than it solves
• Unan­tic­i­pat­ed Results: the whole plot is based on that hyp­not­ic and com­e­dy stereotype
• Post-Hyp­not­ic Sug­ges­tion Fun: “Huge­tas­tic Boobs!”

Rec­om­men­da­tion: Per­son­al­ly, I haven’t laughed as much at an episode in a long time as I did for these two. The stereo­types got worse and worse and the par­o­dies even more so.

Ref­er­ences:

• MM! at TVTropes (Enter at your own risk) The series is so trope laden it has its own page list all of the tropes.