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Amazing Nurse Nanako: Volume 2, Fire-Crackers
by Luis Reyes  
Amazing Nurse Nanako: Fire-Crackers Box Cover
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review ratings information
synopsis
"Operation III - The Psycho Patient"

The police deliver a bound and gagged prisoner, a suspect for a murder spree, to Dr. Kyoji's hospital for some tests (the nature of these tests remain a mystery throughout the episode). Dr. Kyoji enlists Satsuki to bring the patient under hypnosis but before real progress advances, the patient spies Nanako and has an immediate reaction. His genetic make-up mutates turning him into a blue, sweaty- toothed monster that proceeds to chase Nanako around the hospital. Dr. Kyoji suggests using Nanako as bait to re-capture the monster, and the rest of Dr. Kyoji's staff are more than happy to abuse, fondle and torture the amazing nurse in repeated and circuitous attempts to lure the monster into traps.

"Operation IV - Fire-crackers"

Nanako wakes up on display at a weapons convention strapped into Dr. Kyoji's power suit apparently part of a demonstration of the fine doctor's talent for destruction. Before too long, however, an armed-to-the-teeth mecha crashes the party and challenges the doctor, who is actually off on a cliff speaking sternly to an old man in a wheel chair about issues that will surely come up later on in the series. Once the confusion is cleared up, Kyoji's staff totes Allen, the mecha pilot, back to the hospital where, after a cup of tea, he loses control of his prized, kick-ass machinery, which ends up destroying the hospital.

review

Slightly akin to the experience felt when an under-developed six year-old tugs on your shirt at a family function, brimming with the excitement of telling you a joke, a bad joke which he proceeds to tell badly, laughing through the punch line and then for the next ten minutes AT the punch line, "Amazing Nurse Nanako" rivals most other shows as the one most likely to numb me into submission. I've been less annoyed in DMV lines, fending off bored children whose goal it is to smack into my shin at forty miles an hour. I'd have more sympathy for a petulant child screaming about sharing a video game with his sister than I have for the puerile, witless mind that dredged this script up from the swamp of his imagination. The experience of bratty children, that is what watching "Nanako" not only recreates but revels in. Far be it me to criticize artists for doing what they love to do. However, Ku Klux Klan members like burning crosses on peoples' lawns, but I'd still rather that not exist in the world either.

Central to "Nanako's" wretchedness is the eponymous heroine herself who whines and complains her way through a smorgasbord of ridicule, abuse and life threatening situations. I would in no way advocate the abuse of an individual, but if someone actually existed as annoying as Nanako, I can't say that I wouldn't set her up in the line of fire of a fully-armed battle mecha piloted by a psycho scientist who blames her for the manipulation of his girlfriend years before. The story doesn't need to make sense, as long as the mecha doesn't miss its target. But it does, it always does. No matter what bulbous creature sets after Nanako, for whatever reason, no matter how destructive their capabilities prove to be to sidewalks, buildings and mountainsides, nothing ever kills this mis-cast protagonist.

Operation III and IV touch on the wider series arc, poking at Dr. Kyoji's enigmatic past like a kid poking at a dead jellyfish that's washed up on the beach. But the empty-headed antics of this hive of ugly personalities belie any intrigue the writers may have sprinkled into the bland plot. The function of plot in this series is to conjure up situations to wrap around gratuitous crotch shots and tit flashes. The tits are especially important to "Nanako's" creators who have fashioned nearly every female character with gyrating, missile-shaped mammaries.

To be blunt, I have no problem with devilish prurience in my anime, soft-core titillations meant to stir the unstated fires within. But to objectify women to this level and then, on top of that, to submit a character to a destructive level of abuse that resonates with extremely sensitive issues in our own culture takes a sincerely repressed knucklehead.

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