A Shockingly Bad Anime

Juden Chan Checks all the Wrong Boxes
by Bolt Vanderhuge

I’ve written before about Faito ippatsu! Jūden-chan!!, which you may know as Charger Girl Juden Chan or just Juden Chan, but that was based off of the first few episodes. Since then, I decided to subject my friends to this show as revenge for them showing me some of the shows they’ve made me watch, but in the process this meant that I had to watch the whole thing, too.

… Dammit.

So just to briefly summarize for those of you too lazy to go back and read my last article, this is basically a magical girl show crossed with a harem show. The magical girls in this case are the “charger girls” who come from the parallel world called Life Core and work for a company called Neodym to “cure” humans with depression by zapping them with giant plugs. So the gimmick here is basically anything and everything to do with electricity and electrical equipment, such as our main character Plug Cryostat having electrical prong bunny ears. Normally, these electricity-themed magical girls are invisible to humans and intangible to our world, and are thus able to hover, fly, and pass through objects like they got caught in the blast radius of an experimental Romulan phase-cloaking device. For reasons that are never explained, a human named Sento is able to see, hear, and touch these magical girls, and his natural inclination upon seeing them is to hit them in the head with a baseball bat he pulls out of hammer space, or anything else that happens to be within reach. This is what constitutes a running “gag” for this show, because thumping someone in the skull until they pee themselves is funny apparently.

Surprisingly, my attitude toward it really didn’t improve after actually watching the entire thing after all these years. This show is as unapologetically horny as it is misogynistic, and seems to exist solely to cater to as many fetishes as possible so as to attract as many horny otaku as possible. Probably the most notable one is the whole panty-wetting thing, which is also conflated with female orgasm for some reason, and is in every episode at least once, if not several times. There’s also plenty of loli-con and even some sis-con, because of course there is, which whoever made this show deluded themselves into thinking was less creepy if it’s a woman doing this crap.

Who says men can’t write female characters?

This show is basically just porn (the term is hentaiecchi, you uncultured swine) and isn’t even remotely ashamed of it. I’m not even just talking the amount or graphic nature of the nudity, but things like fun with naughty tentacles (the go-to dick stand-ins), and of course the aforementioned obsession with pee. Admittedly there were times I could almost forget about the cringey aspects of the show and almost enjoy it as the porn-with-plot that it is (it even gets somewhat romantic at times), but inevitably something would come along and ruin that.

For five minutes, could you try not being yourself? FOR FIVE MINUTES!?

The show does try to get semi-serious and dare I say even somewhat dramatic at times thanks to it using mental health and depression as the basis for its gimmick, and can otherwise be fun when it isn’t being completely horrible. Just as an example, at one point it completely lampshades the fact that everyone from Plug’s division actually all have the exact same face and just have different hair to distinguish them (a common criticism of anime in general), which is made a bit funnier by the fact they never bother explaining why and never bring it up again. It’s just that I can never get over the more disgusting aspects of this show (fuck you, I will fetish shame you).

Actually one of the more surprising aspects of this show is that it got an English dub and localization at some point after I’d originally watched this in 2010 or so. You can totally watch this show on Crunchyroll under the name Charger Girl Ju-den Chan, though as you might expect from a company owned by the prudish Sony, it’s been censored to edit out as much of the nudity and pee as possible. For the life of me I can’t understand why they bothered, though, because while sex sells and all, if they’re censoring it, I mean, that’s basically the point of the show, so there isn’t much left other than Sento beating the crap out of invisible magical girls.

In any case, I still cannot recommend that you bother watching this show. I mean, I guess if you like to intentionally watch bad anime to laugh at it like I do it might be worth it, but it’s difficult to find an uncensored version to do so with. Otherwise, unless the thought of beating women with a baseball bat gets you all hot and bothered, or you have Tom Hanks levels of pee obsession (seriously, pay attention to how many of his movies feature him peeing), I can’t recommend it for you.

Fuck No! Don’t Check it Out:
Charger Girl Juden-chan (Faito ippatsu! Juden-chan!!)
based on the manga by Bow Ditama
Produced by Studio Hibari, Licenced by Media Blasters