I love chocolate. I’m not a big sweets person, but when grandma bakes a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies that are coming out of the oven piping hot, it’s time to gain a few pounds. I also appreciate brushing my teeth. That feeling of cleanliness you get afterwards is pretty refreshing, especially once you discover what flavor of toothpaste you like. However what I would never ever conceive of doing, is having a big chocolate chip cookie and then brushing my teeth in the next minute. Or vice versa. The mixing of these two otherwise enjoyable things leads to disaster. And that’s what I wanted to talk about today with Liar Liar. 

Liar Liar is an ecchi psychological anime that I picked up this summer season to try out. ONLY because this summer is a bit light on good anime (at least that I’ve found). That’s totally fine by me, as normally I’d never give this a shot based on the tags alone. I mean, ecchi is all about turning your brain off and your dick on maximum to see some wildly lewd situations, likely sprinkled with comedy mixed in. Psychological is about turning off your dick and putting that brain to work to understand the characters’ thought patterns and motives as they duke it out in mind games. The tags seem to conflict by their very nature, and I had to watch some to see if that theory would be true. By God, it fucking was. This anime will hit you with five minutes of the most basic, boring “mind games” you could imagine and then show you a girl’s bra after getting drenched by water. The premise does allow for some occasional interesting setups and character reveals, but about the time my brain settled in to prepare for some big brain activities, I would see a maid on screen who is the most generic “what do you need master” type of character. In fact, everyone in the show so far has been a female ecchi stereotype as our MC was the only male character of merit who appeared across the first two episodes.

I always get scared for the writing when we whip out the "master".

I’m not saying it would be impossible to write a great ecchi psychological anime, but due to the basic conflict of interest between the tags, I do think it would be quite the challenge. A challenge that Liar Liar was clearly not up for as the overpopulation of girls, reliance on overplayed archetypes, and poor mind game writing melts away the “psychological” aspects of the show into the background as if they were an afterthought. I do think it shows potential every now and then, but likely not enough for me to stick around after three episodes. Are you watching Liar Liar this season? Have you seen an anime where the tags work against each other? Is there an anime you enjoy but you wish you could remove a specific tag’s influence from it? Join an academy, become the school’s top student, and hide the fact that it was all a lie thanks to help from your huge harem in the comments below!