#1 It is self-aware enough to get away with being trash
Let me be absolutely clear here: Qwaser of Stigmata is fucking awful. It’s a sexed-up urban fantasy with shitty lore, stupid characters, an edgy emo boy as its male lead, and even fans of ecchi shows are likely to feel a little ashamed of watching it. If I were to describe it one sentence, it would be: Fullmetal Alchemist, but instead of equivalent exchange magic is powered by sexual harassment.
Fortunately, Qwaser of Stigmata is very much aware of its shortcomings and wholeheartedly embraces its own stupidity. A lot of it is played with a self-aware tone and many scenes are used to mock the characters or genre trappings. Sasha got a lot of laughs from me; he is your overpowered MC who always acts aloof towards the other characters, like he is just too cool and serious to bother with them, but the tiniest surprises cause him to break character in hilarious ways. His own friends just stop taking him and his superpower seriously, so he ends up getting beaten up and mocked by everybody.
Other main characters include the tsundere Mafuyu, the bouncy and absent-minded Tomo, the priestess Teresa who just can’t keep her clothes on, and the sex addict Hana who dedicates her life to being a slave to a sadistic exchange student.
#2 Titties 🙂
Qwaser of Stigmata is an ecchi anime with an objective. It doesn’t just want to arouse the common nerd, oh no no no. It wants to be the go-to anime for lactation fetishists the world around. A noble goal, I would say.
The very idea of Qwaser of Stigmata is that bad guys with superpowers based on chemical elements are hunting for some mystical treasure, which the Christian Orthodox church is trying to protect. No matter what side they’re on, the power to control these elements is fueled by Soma, which is effectively just breast milk. A boy named Sasha has moved to Japan on behalf of the church and fights alongside his personal milk dispenser Teresa against a rival organization. There’s probably more to the plot than that, but I got distracted by boobies.
Not a single episode passes without characters going for a few gulps of milk straight from the source, which is all erotically animated with hentai-levels of voice-acting to boot. I’m not even particularly into this stuff, but damn did they put effort into making it look good.
#3 Desperate plot twists
I wanted to joke that manga author Hiroyuki Yoshino should be executed for crimes against literature, but the more I watched this adaptation of his original story, the more I started to fear that the man may have been forced to write it while held at gunpoint.
The plot twists thrown in to retain interest in the story are laughably stupid; so desperate it manages to be simultaneously hilarious and also kind of sad. I swear most of the plot just kind of happens, like a main character who disappears for several episodes and then returns as an oversized furry monster. You’d think that would be some noteworthy development, but it has 0 build-up and is sorted-out within half an episode, after which it is never addressed again or even slightly investigated. I have rarely had the pleasure of seeing a show so utterly mishandle its plot; it really should become a case study for future writers.
The final few episodes are just a quick succession of ludicrous twists, all of which I have to restrain myself from spoiling because it’s so fun to talk about. The breast milk fountains man, you gotta see this nonsense in context.
