Sister Princess Saturday Report! No. 1 – Promised Island Is Hell

Today is this blog’s second anniversary. Instead of a sappy message, I present the beginning of a blogging series that I hope will be both strange and fun to read. Enjoy as I delve into the true evil of Sister Princess! For those who don’t know, Sister Princess is a series about a dude who gets shuttled off to a remote island where he finds 12 girls who are all his younger sisters, and they all love him unconditionally and address him with different annoying affectations. Sounds fun, right? Of course it doesn’t. But that won’t stop me from watching the whole thing and writing about it week-by-week. However, railing repeatedly on a show that, let’s face it, is basically the opposite of everything I enjoy about anime would eventually get old and tired. With that in mind, I tried to take a different approach to this. I have no idea where it will take me, but that’s part of the fun!

Let’s get to it, shall we?

Flesh. Bone. Bound together with the oddest magickal incantation, this wretched book captured for all eternity one boy’s spiral into true madness. The signs had been there from the beginning, but Wataru, the poor fool, had been too blindsided by circumstance to spot them.

He was the No. 1 student in his class and had looked forward to getting into a prestigious high school. Alas, his score on his acceptance test was far too low due to a grievous error: The answers on his test were misaligned, and the computer read them incorrectly. A simple slip-up, easy to fix; however, the test-givers could not be bothered to correct this mistake, and they coldly ignored Wataru’s pleas to fix the error. Dejected, he walked home without pushing the issue further.

There was his first mistake: Assuming the fact that his answers were “misaligned” — such a convenient excuse — was but a simple mistake, that there was nothing more behind it.

After arriving home following that pathetic display, Wataru was ambushed by a butler and two G-Men, stuffed into the back of a van and dumped off at a dock, where an elderly fisherman who looked suspiciously like the previous butler picked him up and took him to . . . Promised Island. If I may interrupt the narrative for one moment and comment on our . . . hero’s . . . observational skills, it is worth noting that he seems not to have suspected any wrongdoing even after being kidnapped and dragged to an island. Far be it from me to wish pain on any person, but the author of these notes could not possibly have been a thicker idiot. Perhaps he deserved his cruel fate.

Wataru piled into the tiny ferry that was on its way to Promised Island, where he would find Stargazer’s Hill West University, an institution that just happened to accept Wataru during his time of greatest need, and without an application, even! More and more the signs piled up, but Wataru paid them no heed, focused as he was on his personal pity party. He was accompanied by two passengers: One a loudmouth teenager who would not shut up about his past accomplishments, and the other a teenage girl who seemed exasperated by the circumstances but who nonetheless kept sneaking furtive glances at Wataru as he leaned against the side of the ferry.

These were not looks of love, the glances born of an innocent crush. Wataru did not know it at the time, but my research tells me that she had on her person a photograph of Wataru and was sent by a mysterious third party to spy on him for reasons I’ve yet to uncover. But this is unimportant at the moment. Along the way to Promised Island, the ferry passed by a large, vaguely racist statue that would prove to be the ultimate source of Wataru’s madness: The statue of the Sister Princess.

Although it has existed for several millennia, the statue of the Sister Princess remains shrouded in mystery. Even the most ancient of texts refers only vaguely to a sort of mystical power the statue possesses. Perhaps the statue is imbued with magickal energy; others say it houses a deity. Still others believe it is a relic of extraterrestrial beings. But there is one theme common to literature on the statue: Sacrifice. The Sister Princess is said to cry out for the blood of an innocent once every five years. How the blood sacrifices are chosen is unknown; unfortunately, the eye of the Sister Princess cast itself on Wataru this day.

When he arrived to Promised Island, Wataru fell into the ocean and seemed destined for an early demise, a mysterious girl flew overhead in a boat attached to a crane and rescued him by pulling Wataru out of the water, all the while shouting, “Onii-chan!” (It is here that I should mention a rather bizarre quirk of Wataru’s notes: They are separated into 26 chapters, and they alternate from Japanese to English with each new chapter. The tome begins in Japanese, the next is in English, and so on from there.) Perhaps this meeting should have raised more red flags for Wataru, but he was occupied by his impending drowning.

The young girl, who called herself “Karen”, helped dry off Wataru and addressed him in a polite manner. However, there seemed to be more to her behavior than she let on. Wataru had on his person a digital camera, which for reasons beyond my ken somehow survived his ordeal. As I gazed upon the photo of Karen drying Wataru with her handkerchief, I could not help but notice — perhaps aided by knowledge of events to come — the murderous glint in Karen’s eye. Even upon first meeting, she may have thirsted for innocent blood. But the way she carried herself appealed to Wataru, and he could not help but be charmed, the fool.

Wataru suddenly realized that his clothes were wet, and so he went to a clothing store to buy a new outfit. (Although his bag did not fall into the ocean with him, it seems Wataru did not have time to prepare a fresh change of clothes.) There he met another young woman — who went by the name of “Sakuya” and addressed Wataru as “onii-sama” — who asked Wataru to zip up her dress while she was in the changing area. Because Wataru was so stupidly innocent and chaste, a slight blush raced across his face as he caught a glimpse of Sakuya’s back. As a reward, Sakuya helped Wataru choose a fashionable outfit — no doubt choosing the ideal costume for a presentable sacrifice. Sakuya parted ways with typical compliments and flirtations, which Wataru bought hook, line and sinker. The poor, stupid fool’s hormones were going into overdrive as he fell in love for the second time that day.

It was on his way up a hill searching for a place to live where Wataru ran into yet another girl, Kaho, who laid it on thick by professing Wataru to be a kind, good and cool person and addressing him as “onii-chama” after meeting him for five seconds. Wataru brushed off these initial compliments at first, because in his heart of hearts he knew what a failure he was, but Kaho eventually won Wataru’s pity by tripping and flapping her arms like a goose, as if to say, “I shall persevere!” It was a cunningly calculated maneuver; Wataru, that fool of fools, bought into it completely, and even seemed to be energized by Kaho’s idiocy. He soon found an apartment and rushed to the school to finish his registration with his renewed sense of false hope.

However, it is unknown if Wataru ever made it to the registration. Soon after his arrival, he became distracted by a lilting piano tune coming from one of the upstairs rooms at the school. Through a crack in the doorway, Wataru sneaked a glance at Sakuya playing the piano before the doors fell down, and Wataru was exposed. But rather than being perturbed at Wataru’s voyeurism, Sakuya invited Wataru to go shopping with her, which he accepted the thought that a girl would go on a legitimate date with him and make the first move somehow burned its way through his synapses. Sakuya said she was looking for a gift for her brother and ultimately chose a bizarre watch that appeared to be an analog watch but revealed a digital watch underneath that cover. Perhaps it was a mocking symbol meant to inform Wataru that nothing is as it seems on Promised Island. No doubt Sakuya knew that Wataru’s feeble mind would not grasp this truth until it was too late.

Wataru ventured back to his new home after a long, tiring day and was surprised to find it occupied when he arrived. The three young women he had met throughout the day — and another, Hinako, who had been neglected to be mentioned until now because that’s how useless she is — greeted him by revealing that they were Wataru’s younger sisters. Their trumped up charms were the only thing on his mind as he accepted Sakuya’s gift with glee and dined with his newfound “sisters”, taking in a meal of curry. That Wataru accepted this twist with minimal fuss shows how much the delusion had managed to take hold of him his first day on Promised Island.

Perhaps even from the time Wataru set foot on the island, it was too late for him.