This is pretty spoiler-rific so I don’t recommend reading this unless you don’t mind knowing the gist.
The old man’s face cracks me up.
Why fantasize about your love when you can just kidnap her?
Let me just say I love the classical opening song. It is an artful tranquility seemingly lost with the times. Yet music is immortal, stepping on all the stones of time no matter how small. Rowdy Sumo Wrestler Matsutaro’s first impression is the opposite; it is boisterous and lacking etiquette of any form, and won’t likely pass the test of time. That doesn’t mean it is bad though, which I’ll be getting to later.
The titular character is a crude bully with nonexistent manners with some “authority” issues. He has no shame in deliberately stealing another student’s work in plain sight during class and man-handling school staff members. Naturally the only person there he is nice to is the sexy shoujo-esque teacher(?) Minami. Later on Matsutaro says that seeing her is the only reason he goes to school. I can actually sympathize with him on the last part knowing how I’ve felt about past crushes.
After school he goes through his daily routine of kicking dirt in a dog’s face, getting old ladies wet, literally stealing candy from a baby (one of his five siblings), stealing other people’s bento, and using ridiculous shonen powers to save old men from their menial duties. Afterwards he deliberately sets up a situation where he pretends to be filled with rage to convince a truck driver to haul his load of coal that was blocking the road. Although he seems stupid, Matsutaro is pretty sharp even though he usually focuses on brute force.
He commandeers the truck, nearly runs over his family, literally steals the girl of his dreams, then crashes through a Women’s Bath. Finally he gets arrested along with the old man. The entire episode was about some asshole doing asshole things so it is inherently awful, right? No, because it is the first episode of a genre that always has the main character improve through discipline. Obviously he will become a sumo wrestler and become a better person blah blah blah.
Despite Matsutaro being so contemptible, I couldn’t help but be amused by how blunt and uncaring he is throughout the episode and everyone outright acknowledges he is a horrible jerk. The main reason I find this funny is because faulty characters like this aren’t normally universally condemned for ill behavior in anime. Everything after the car-jacking was also hilarious for all the low-key GTA-ness that happened.
I believe the aim is to show us how unforgivably horrible the protagonist is in a bitterly humorous way, then pave the way for development. It wasn’t the best decision, because now most expect the show to simply be about an asshole being an asshole and not, well, something not like that. Though I’m not 100% sure of the direction this is taking, the writing is competent enough for it to (hopefully) end up being a heartwarming story about a dysfunctional, occasionally half-naked brute maturing and having more drunken waifu-stealing misadventures with old men.
Awkwords 