Etra chan saw it! / YMMV

Alternative Character Interpretation: Taking into account that the twelve main characters are all just actors playing the roles assigned to them in each story, why does Etra-chan cast the "Protagonist" characters as exclusively heroes while the "Antagonist" characters are usually villains and only occasionally the heroes? Is it simply for the sake of convenience, or are the "Antagonists" more experienced actors who can handle a larger variety of roles compared to the greener "Protagonists"?
Archive Panic: There are hundreds of videos, all averaging ten minutes in length, and there's a new one posted almost every day. Good luck watching every single one.
Base-Breaking Character:
- Karin. While she has her fans for being a bold, strong, righteous protagonist who takes no shit and is willing to get into fights for the sake of her friends, family, and children alike, some other fans find that she can be rather unpleasant in how judgmental and sanctimonious she comes across as. Most notably, these videos with Yuzuriha and Akamatsu are where people consider her at her worst, as she was completely unsympathetic to Yuzuriha's tragic situation as an adult and came off as rather abusive as Akamatsu's mother.
- Tsutsuji is generally well liked for being a very nice and sweet character, but there are those, particularly in the English fanbase, who take issue with just how much of a doormat she is at times. Even when she is the main protagonist of a story, she almost never gets herself out of whatever predicament she's in and nearly always ends up needing to be saved from the antagonists by a third party. She's a pretty passive character in general, but she has had her moments, though these usually involve her standing up for people other than herself.
Can't Un-Hear It: Trina Deuhart and Paul Hikari are the most iconic voice actors of the series owing to their acting and dynamic range. Commenters of other Lab316 works also recognize them as actors from this series.
Complete Monster: "My best friend suddenly passed away and his wife asked me to marry her": This version of Hiiragi is seen as both a "perfect" guy and Kuroki's best friend, but in reality this is just a mask to hide his true self. A notorious bully in middle school, Hiiragi either ordered or personally participated in bullying so severe that several students dropped out and one received a burn so severe it damaged his eye; Hiiragi acted like an angel in front of the teachers to avoid any punishment, but became feared by the rest of the students. Becoming a better actor in high school, Hiiragi still started dating Yuzuriha solely to get a reaction out of Kuroki, and became upset when the boy he was pretending to be friends with acted as if it didn't bother him. Learning that Yuzuriha inherited a large sum of money from her parents, Hiiragi proposed to her to take her money. When she saw through this and refused, Hiiragi raped her and force her to marry him, abusing and treating her like a slave for five years before his death. A horrible person who was not mourned by those who knew his true self, to the point they saw his death as karma, his actions continue to haunt his "best friend" and widow months after his death.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- John the American. Only a bit character, but when he's on screen, the fans love him for his Adorkable demeanor and enthusiasm for Japanese culture.
- The older version of Katsura in the English version sometimes speaks with German accent. This causes some fans to love him for his accent.
- A lot of fans love Yuzuriha especially as a protagonist due to her creative ways of getting revenge on those who wronged her.
Evil Is Cool: With their wider range of roles that allow them to show off both sides of themselves, name one fan who doesn't think the antagonists are more interesting than the protagonists.
Fan Nickname: Akamatsu and Akane are often called Bakamatsu and Bakane due to them lacking common sense as antagonists.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- Yuzuriha in this video tries to look like Karin to the point of resorting to plastic surgery because of Hiiragi. Long after the episode has been released, this video portrays both of them as twins.
- In one episode, Tsutsuji is revealed to be Yuzuriha in disguise. In a later episode, Tsutsuji cosplays as Yuzuriha for a high school festival.
- In this episode, Yuzuriha considers pretending to be dead and showing up to the house of her obnoxious mother-in-law Azami as a ghost to scare her but decides to not go through with it as it probably wasn't worth the time and effort. Several episodes later, she ended up doing just that, at least the pretending to be dead part.
Les Yay:
- One episode where Yuzuriha is a doctor has Tsutsuji going completely gaga for her, to the point her blushing gets mistaken for a fever and every time she looks at Yuzuriha there is a pink gaussian blur.
- Another has one moment with Karin and Tsutsuji, where after Karin finally divorces herself from Akamatsu, she happily decides to take Tsutsuji out to dinner, complete with a little heart at the end of her sentence and imagining Tsutsuji calling out to her with a smile, who also has a heart at the end of her sentence. It's almost like a bookend to when she wanted to take out her then husband Akamatsu to dinner and was cruelly rebuffed.
- In this episode, Akane can be seen blushing when she describes Tsutsuji's body as "pretty banging'' and seems just as excited as the guys in their class to see her cosplay Yuzuriha.
Love to Hate: Hiiragi is a serviceable protagonist, but he just plays the villain so damn well that most fans wouldn't have him any other way.
Memetic Badass: Yuzuriha is often seen as this due to how effective she can be when getting back at those who wronged her as well as being one of the more assertive characters. She also overlaps with Memetic Psychopath during her more unhinged moments.
Moe:
- The child versions of the characters. What helps is that the child versions of the antagonists are usually nicer and more innocent than their adult selves. For example, when Hiiragi has a good or neutral role as a child, he's usually either a Shrinking Violet or an Adorably Precocious Child.
- In terms of individual characters, Yuri is the standout example. Sweet, innocent, and typically given a soft, high-pitched voice, what's not to love?
Moral Event Horizon: If Azami and Hiiragi in this episode didn't already cross it when they abused their children or even when they confined Katsura to his room for not getting into medical school the first time, they crossed it after they found out that Katsura apparently committed suicide. Instead of having a My God, What Have I Done? moment where they realize they were too hard on him, they call him an embarrassment and useless.
Narm:
- Serious moments in some episodes of the English dub can be undercut as a result of Soundtrack Dissonance such as this episode where the creepy music is played during the backstory of Hiiragi and his mother in the original Japanese episode, though in the English dub, the upbeat music kept playing.
- The voice acting can be very hit-or-miss sometimes, leading to dramatic moments being ruined by Dull Surprise. Karin is particularly bad about this.
Shipping: But of course, given that relationships are probably the most common topic covered on the show. Basically every possible pairing between the male and female characters has been done, so each one has basis. Tachibana/Yuri is particularly popular considering the former is one of the antagonist actors, and is thus just as likely to be abusing or cheating on Yuri as he is to be a genuinely loving partner to her.
Squick: The same twelve cast members being recycled for different roles can lead to scenarios such as Akamatsu and Karin being a married couple in one episode, then siblings in another, then mother and son in the next. This can be unsettling for some.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Etra-chan's cast usually consists of characters who either strictly align as protagonists (Karin, Tsutsuji, Yuri, Tokusa, Kuroki and Katsura) or antagonists (Akane, Azami, Yuzuriha, Akamatsu, Hiiragi and Tachibana). Occasionally, she'll have her antagonistic characters take on protagonist or good roles... but rarely ever does the reverse. Only twice has she had her protag characters in antagonistic roles; once, when Katsura ended up obsessively stalking Yuri, and in another during an anniversary video when the protag characters treated their counterparts horribly, which shocked Etra-chan herself. However, Katsura's episode still had him treated with utmost sympathy (which is rarely ever offered to obsessive characters like Hiiragi and Yuzuriha), and the anniversary video ended up being a joke all the characters played on Etra-chan. There's a few other examples where the protagonist characters could arguably be said to have gotten antagonistic roles, but those instances are often misunderstandings where the protagonists are shown to be well meaning if misguided. Some fans feel like if bad characters get to play good roles every now and then, then the good characters should also get play bad roles too, as it would subvert expectations and spice up the status quo.^note
Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The early Japanese outros featured an older 3D Etra model. Her face looked odd, and her mouth was too big not helped by the Limited Animation. It's rather telling that the older dubbed episodes replaced the outros with the newer ones.
Unintentionally Sympathetic:
- Yuzuriha from the this video. In this, she is portrayed as the ill daughter of a prostitute who was infected since birth by her mother's STD's, and was seen as quite creepy and dangerous for trying to enact a blood bond with Karin which could have gotten her sick too. Etra-Chan even wonders if she knew she was sick and was trying to infect others. However, the comments in the video saw her in a completely tragic light, as she was a terribly lonely girl who was isolated from society for the actions of her mother, could never go to school because of her illness, and just wanted a friend. In her last moments, all she could think of was Karin, who she still considered her friend. This also has the adverse effect of making Karin Unintentionally Unsympathetic, as although it is understandable for child Karin to be afraid, the fact that when she gets the whole truth as an adult, she does not even spare her a sympathetic thought when Yuzuriha dies, even thinking how she was not her friend when her mother tells her that Yuzuriha called out for her in her deathbed.
- Hiiragi in this video. Tsutsuji and Yuri both theorize that Mayor Hiiragi came to school to discuss bullying as a means to get back at Akane's father Akamatsu for bullying him in school by turning his daughter against him, and Etra-chan herself wonders if that's the case. However, it's hard not to feel sympathy for Hiiragi considering the terrible things he had gone through, and the fact is he also set up a helpline for students who face bullying that the teachers may not either know about or care about, showing that - whether or not he intended to get back at Akamatsu, which is ambiguous in itself - he does care for the wellbeing of the students. And some commenters pointed out, Akamatsu lied to Akane about his relationship with Hiiragi and refused to own up to his mistakes when they inadvertently hurt Akane, and thus needs to face the consequences of his actions.
- Poor Akamatsu in episode, as his parents rather easily believe a scam phone call from someone posing as him claiming to have have run someone over and in need of money, which causes his parents to denounce and beat him when he comes over with his family to see them. His parents never take his word despite how he's pleading with them his innocence, and it's only when his preteen daughters point out that the timeline doesn't make any sense since they were with him when the call happened do his parents realize their mistake and apologize to him. The episode tries to paint Tokusa and Yuzuriha as misguided due to a scam and because it's Akamatsu, who is usually an antagonistic character, the audience is meant to suspect him as well. However, its hard not to feel complete pity for him as he breaks down in tears at the end, and even though his parents end up apologizing to him until the end, one can't help but feel they failed him big time as his parents for how easily the believed the worst in him and overreacted.
- Akane in this episode. While what she said to her mother was harsh, this was when she was a young child, too young to even remember it as she grew up, and it was the result of her grandparents brainwashing her. Especially since throughout the video, we are shown that she repeatedly tried to get her mother's love and attention, but Yuzuriha refused to engage with her at all, leading Akane down a path of self-destruction and self-loathing. The narrative tries to paint it as Akane's mistake (and the grandparents cruel manipulations), but all it did was paint Akane as a victim and Yuzuriha as a terrible parent who was Easily Forgiven.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
- On two separate occasions, Tsutsuji plays the role of an abused housewife and mother who almost commits suicide and takes her child with her. In one of them, the story opens with Kuroki walking home only to stumble across Tsutsuji standing at the railing of a bridge holding her baby while implicitly preparing to jump into the river only to stop because he interrupts her. The other is more explicit, with Tsutsuji telling her 5-year-old daughter Yuri that they were going to the ocean to "Go see grandma", only to reconsider when Yuri refuses because grandma had made her promise before she died that neither she nor her mother would go to see her until they were as old as she was. In both cases, but especially the latter case many commenters on the English channel lost sympathy for her when they realized what she intended on doing, feeling it was wrong for her do something like that when a child isn't old enough to understand or consent to such a thing.
- As mentioned above, Karin comes off this way when she continues to have no sympathy for Yuzuriha even after learning the whole story of why she did what she tried to do when they were younger.
- In another video, Karin also comes across as this. The video was trying to portray her son Akamatsu as a someone who ran away from responsibility, who finally matured and made amends with his mother when he became a parent himself as a lesson of humility and responsibility. However, his mother Karin did not come across as particularly sympathetic, angry that he abandoned her and threatening to take his son away if he ever asked for help again, only relenting when Katsura cried out for his father - but not before slapping Akamatsu and self-righteously reprimanding him right in front of his crying child. Some fans found her actions extreme, and wonder if this was the reason he ran off in the first place considering in the beginning of the video he mentioned he left because his mother was too strict.
- Some fans felt this way about Yuri in the episode where she believes Kuroki is cheating on her due to Akane's accusations. While it's true that Akane is her childhood friend, some people pointed out that Yuri did nothing to investigate the matter on her own, like asking the people at Kuroki's work or hiring a private investigator, instead just taking her friend's word and instantly believing them despite her husband's explanations. Because of this, some people thought Kuroki should not have forgiven her so easily and that he should have rethought his relationship with her, either leaving her or have her be the one to rebuild his trust in her.
- Another instance with Yuri, but in this case she's the one being accused of having an affair. She agrees to a DNA test just to get her in-laws off her back, but is upset when Tachibana comes home with one, believing that even he's starting to doubt her. As Tachibana points out, she was the one who agreed to the test in the first place, so why is she mad at him for following through? Instead, Tachibana is treated as the bad guy for "doubting" Yuri, when he was obviously just trying to appease his parents.
- Yuzuriha in this episode comes off as this as she easily believes Hiiragi's Malicious Slander towards her fiance Kuroki to the point of leaving the latter for the former, only to get back together with Kuroki in the end once Hiiragi's lies are revealed. It doesn't help that, never mind that Hiiragi was a known liar, Yuzuriha didn't bother to verify if what Hiiragi said was true or not and was ready to believe the worst of Kuroki based on word alone when, given that they have known each other long enough to be engaged, she should've known better.
- Tokusa and Yuzuriha are both this during this episode, as they both rather easily believe a scam phone call from "Akamatsu", who claims to have have run someone over and in need of money, which causes them to denounce and beat Akamatsu when he comes over with his family to see him. They never take his word despite how he's pleading with them his innocence, and it's only when his preteen daughters point out that the timeline doesn't make any sense since they were with him when the call happened do they realize their mistake and apologize. The episode tries to paint Tokusa and Yuzuriha as misguided due to a scam and because it's Akamatsu, who is usually an antagonistic character, the audience is meant to suspect him as well. However, it's easy to see Tokusa and Yuzuriha as getting off lightly for how they treated their son without proof, and some comments note that if Tokusa and Akamatsu were switched in the situation, Tokusa would have likely cut ties with his parents for their mistrust and abuse.^note
- Yuzuriha again in this episode, as she neglected Akane for most of her life because Akane, as a small, brainwashed child, said some rather harsh things to her mother due to the manipulations of her grandparents Azami and Hiiragi. But rather than solely blame the grandparents for their terrible influence or repair her relationship with her daughter the minute they moved away and cut off contact with said grandparents, Yuzuriha instead takes it out on Akane and barely pays attention to her growing up. What's worse is that Akane is also show as a young child and teenager as having repeatedly done all she can to spend time with her mother or get her attention in some way, and didn't remember saying these words at all to her mother because of how young she was. The results end up leading Akane to a self-destructive life-style because her self-esteem is so low, and its only after a violent, attempted assault that Yuzuriha finally shows some semblance of care. And even then, when Akane demands to know why her mother now cares and why she never did before, all she can do is tell Akane to go to Uncle Tachibana's house to see the tapes of her child-self insulting her, rather than explain anything herself. This leads the poor girl into blaming herself for everything when she sees the tapes, when the people who should be blamed are the adults who mistreated her.
Vanilla Protagonist: Most of the time the protagonists are just normal people getting caught up in strange situations. Katsura in particular is prone to getting casted in roles where no particular character quirks are needed.
Values Dissonance
- In this story, Azami is concerned about her granddaughter, Yuzuriha, being born on March 31 instead of waiting for April to be born. While Azami's reaction is over-the-top, and Azami ranting about her granddaughter's birthday every time Yuzuriha is mentioned is portrayed as wrong, much of the nuance is missing for the English-speaking audience. Azami is an elementary school teacher who has noticed problems kids born in March have. The school year in Japan starts in April, meaning Yuzuriha was born just before the enrollment cutoff date, and will be the youngest kid in her class, a genuine concern, though taken to ridiculous extremes with Azami. For much of the English-speaking audience, though, it comes off as Azami just randomly hating March for no reason.
- Many Western fans of the series expressed how upset they were in the comments for this video, that Yuri's neighbors knew that she was being abused by her husband but did nothing about it. Unfortunately in Japan, it's commonly believed (especially in older generations), that domestic issues are private matters and should be handled within the family and that others shouldn't interfere because it's none of their business.
The Woobie:
- On a nearly episodic basis. Kuroki, Tsutsuji, Yuri, and Tachibana (in his good roles) seem to have it especially rough.
- The child version of Hiiragi is this. There is a disturbing number of episodes where he has been abused, neglected and/or left for dead by at least one of his parents. To further twist the knife, in these episodes, he's usually one of the sweetest little kids.
Woolseyism: This story has one. In the original Japanese version Kuroki called his aunt and cousin the cross-dressing comedian Matsuko Deluxe and pro-wrestler Koriki Choshu. In the English dub he just calls them Snorlax and Eric Cartman since the references wouldn't make sense to a non-Japanese audience.
- The Spanish dub keeps the reference in, only replacing "Eric Cartman" with "Shrek or Fiona", since Shrek is far more known in Latin America than South Park.

YMMV / Etra chan saw it!

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