A Good Librarian Like a Good Shepherd (Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai)

(12 episodes)

What’s it about ?

Adaptation of a dating sim visual novel (which spawned a small franchise with five different manga adaptations, some light novels, and now this).

Characters

Kakei, our male lead, has the power of being super-boring. And, as an aside, to have random prescient flashes, but mostly being really, really boring. He’s got this monotone narration that would put anyone to sleep. He’s the only regular member of the library club, which means his main hobby is reading books alone.

Takamine, his mandatory lecherous best friend. And only friend, by the look of it. Since Kakei is inexplicably a chick magnet (thanks to genre conventions), he tags along and goes for the leftovers.

Shirasaki is a shy big-busted girl that Kakei saves from a traffic accident… and of course he ends up with his hand grabbing her chest. She spends half the episode chasing him… to thank him. And she wants him for her “make life fun” project. She doesn’t have anything but the name, but please help her ? At least until Golden Week ?

Sakuraba is one of the many irrate people who hunt Kakei down after pictures of the incident get passed around. But since she’s a pretty girl, she gets to mellow quickly and join the cast as the token tsundere.

Mochizuki, the Student Council President, cuts in to mention that she already has views on Kakei… er, strictly as a potential Student Council member, of course. Yeah, right.

As for the Shepherd, it’s a mysterious person sending emails with either some gossip (such as the aforementioned pictures), or cryptic garbage. A scene at the end implies they may actually be a group, with eyes on headhunting Kakei as their next leader.

Production Values

Decent enough for this kind of thing. The direction tries livening up the proceedings, but it can’t overcome the boringness of it all.

Overall Impression

Zzzzzzzz…

You may have inferred I found this a bit boring. The protagonist has no charisma whatsoever, the plot is sluggish, the hijinks beyond stale, and the Shepherd thing feels bizarrely underused despite being the one point that makes the show somewhat distinctive. Also, I’m a bit nonplussed by the setting. (50,000 students in the academy ? 650 per class ?)

My interest in this is close to nil.

via [In Which I Review] New anime, Fall 2014 – Page 5.

Published by

Jhiday

I've been kinda blogging about anime for years... but mostly on forums (such as RPG.net's Tangency) and other sites. This site is an archive for all that stuff, just in case.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.