Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! / YMMV

Awesome Art:
- The character designs are all unique, distinctive, and expressive, and the anime brings them all to life expertly with Masaaki Yuasa's Signature Style of exaggerated poses and vibrant colors. Fitting for a show about how wonderful animation can be.
- The backgrounds show off Studio Bihou's versatility to its fullest. From the show's detailed bizarre cityscape which the characters live in, to the imaginary world of Asakusa's and its rougher, unfinished appearance. Even the more amateurish look of the Art Club's backgrounds are pulled off flawlessly.
Awesome Music:
- "Easy Breezy" by chelmico, the opening theme. With a peppy beat, catchy vocal performance, and addicting, colorful visuals, there's a reason people are calling it one of the best openings of the Winter 2020 season.
- "Imagination" is a rather peculiar and quirky tune conveying a wholesome feeling.
- "Namae No Nai Ao", the ending theme. Its high-energy rhythm, driving guitars, and impassioned vocals complement the charge forward that the main trio continuously perform throughout the credits, serving well for both the animation and the show's general themes of just what a team of determined, creative, and capable individuals can accomplish.
Diagnosed by the Audience:
- Midori Asakusa is commonly interpreted by fans as autistic and/or having ADHD. She's often characterized as childish, tends to get lost in fantasies, has a strong attachment to certain objects (including a stuffed rabbit that she keeps as a Security Blanket, clutching it when overwhelmed or nervous), hyperfixates on certain topics, and displays such immense difficulty with being around strangers, especially in crowded settings, that she relies on keeping her friends around her at all times when she goes out in public. It helps that author Sumito Owara has stated that he in part based Asakusa on his own experiences with autism and ADHD ^note.
- Much like with Asakusa, Mizusaki shows several characteristics that lead fans to see her as autistic. Much of this comes from her emphasis on repetition, especially in regards to things that catch her interest, her tendency to info-dump when discussing body movements, and her fixation on character animation to the point where she gets distressed when her ability to engage in it is threatened. The fact that she displays a subdued and professional demeanor around fans, but more readily opens up when around people she considers close enough to trust is also noted as paralleling behaviors found in "neurotypical-passing" autistic individuals.
Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Despite showing up fairly late in the series and having a much more peripheral role in the Motion Picture Club than the main trio (to the point where her appearances with all three are fairly minimal), Doumeki quickly became just as popular as them among fans, in part due to her being an approximate and appropriate middle ground between Asakusa & Mizusaki and Kanamori in terms of personality as well as due to her own enthusiasm towards sound design helping endear her to fans in the same way that Asakusa and Mizusaki's enthusiasm for animation aid in their appeal.
- Sowande, who appears much less often than Doumeki (having just enough major appearances in the anime adaptation to count on one hand) and has an even less direct connection to the Motion Picture Club, also became fairly popular among fans, thanks to her Reasonable Authority Figure role and position as a member of the student council lending to a much more nuanced and positive portrayal of a black woman than what tends to be typical in anime. Even without the racial context, her ability to act as both a well-meaning supervisor for the Motion Picture Club (keeping them from overstepping their boundaries while still making room for their work-related necessities) and an effective foil to Kanamori lends to a significant level of appeal with the show's fanbase.
Fan Nickname: Took off initially once the anime premiered, but seemed to die down as its run progressed in favor of using the main characters' actual names.
- "Tall Girl" seems to have become one for Sayaka Kanamori, on account of her staggering height being her most prominent physiological trait.
- Fans have taken to calling Asakusa "Gremlin"/"Goblin" on account of the combination of her short stature, energetic demeanor, and wide-eyed, wide-faced design, all reminiscent of the "Gremlin D.Va" meme. Some fans also refer to Asakusa as "Bucket Hat Girl," owing entirely to her near-omnipresent nice hat, or "Frog/Frog Girl," on account of her wide, far-apart eyes, small nose, and wide, flat mouth being froglike in design.
- "Fashion Girl" seems to be the current go-to for Mizusaki on account of her profession as a fashion model.
Foe Yay Shipping: There's been a rise in Sowande x Kanamori shippers thanks to the interactions between the two girls, their similar cutthroat and cunning natures, and how they serve as foils to each other.
Just Here for Godzilla: Eizouken as a manga is rather niche and obscure, owing to both its highly unusual subject matter and the generally niche nature of manga in the west compared to anime. When it was adapted, a vast majority of the show's audience learned of its existence by seeing the "Easy Breezy" opening and wanted to know what the heck all that was about. Those that knew of the source material beforehand, meanwhile, came for "Tall Girl" Kanamori instead.
Les Yay: Having a primarily female cast tends to result in copious amounts of this among the series's fanbase.
- There's a huge portion of the fanbase who ships Asakusa and Kanamori together, dubbed "KNAS" by fans on both sides of the Pacific. The girls' Odd Friendship provides an intriguing basis for their relationship with each other, helped in large part by Kanamori's role as the Cloudcuckoolander's Minder, and she's often depicted as a protector figure to Asakusa, whose hyperactive imagination can get her into trouble; the fact that the two have been friends since middle school and that Kanamori is familiar with and accommodates for Asakusa's quirks and difficulty with socializing further adds onto this. Kanamori's Serious Business attitude towards furthering Eizouken's goals is often interpreted as her going the extra mile for Asakusa's sake, with her excuse of making money only being the facade of a tsundere.
- A smaller but still noticeable number of people ship Asakusa with Mizusaki, owing to the two sharing similar demeanors and interests and general "kindred spirits" dynamic that already allowed them to become close friends in canon pretty quickly and stay friends throughout the series.
- And to round off the trio is Kanamori with Mizusaki. There are plenty of moments where Mizusaki makes observations about Kanamori with a near-admiring tone that could be twisted by shippers as her gushing about her crush. There's also her noting some of Kanamori's physical qualities like her long legs and her apparently getting a haircut in a manner that could easily be interpreted as Loving Details (Kanamori getting a haircut is basically an Informed Attribute joke that's not hard to twist into Mizusaki ogling her enough to have noticed that tiny of a difference).
LGBT Fanbase: Despite being primarily oriented for young adult men, the series has a noticeably large following among lesbian, bisexual, and pansexual women, especially in the west, on account of its surprisingly large and well-portrayed female cast and female-centric storytelling, with copious amounts of room for Les Yay.
Memetic Mutation:
- The girls' dance◊ in the opening is beginning to be spread around à la the torture dance which it is compared to as its Distaff Counterpart.
- Fanart of other characters in the poses of Eizouken's main trio from the opening have spread like wildfire across the internet, particularly if said characters share a similar dynamic or appearance to Asakusa, Mizusaki, and Kanamori.
- Comparing the show to Ed, Edd n Eddy.^note It didn't take long at all for the internet to come up with an Ed Edd n Eddy version of the opening, this time featuring the Kanker sisters in place of the Eizouken trio.
- The anime's unconventional art style provides a trove of highly-memeable facial expressions, most of which belong to Asakusa.
- Comfy Asakusa^Explanation
Moe: Asakusa and Mizusaki's enthusiasm for animation, active imaginations, and distinctive, appealing designs quickly made them darlings in the anime fandom.
My Real Daddy: Despite the series primarily being the brainchild of Sumito Owara, who created the property and is the sole creative contributor to the manga, a number of fans consider the anime adaptation's director, Masaaki Yuasa, to be a more critical force in bringing the series to life in a way that could appeal to a wide range of audiences (as the manga's premise and approach were highly niche even in Japan).
Periphery Demographic: The series has garnered a surprisingly large following among the neurodivergent community, especially once the anime adaptation began airing, thanks to Asakusa and Mizusaki embodying a large number of characteristics common among autistic people and people with ADHD (particularly the former) without invoking negative stereotypes of either condition.
Ships That Pass in the Night: For whatever reason, ships that pair one of the main trio with Doumeki exist, despite neither party in each pair being particularly close to each other nor sharing enough meaningful interaction to even warrant such shipping. Most ships that involve Doumeki tend to pair her up with Mizusaki (dubbed MZDO), if only out of a Pair the Spares mentality (given the high popularity of KNAS).
Suspiciously Similar Song: "Easy Breezy" sounds an awful lot like "Super Shooter," the OP of Gantz. chelmico, the group responsible for "Easy Breezy", cite Rip Slyme, the group responsible for "Super Shooter", as one of their main influences, with their shared love for it being what first brought them together.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The conflict between Mizusaki and her parents over her efforts to become an animator receives barely any payoff, to the point of seeming like an Aborted Arc. What's more, Mizusaki's parents could have made a perfectly legitimate argument against their daughter's pursuit of a career in animation— that animators struggle to earn a living (like Ema from Shirobako) and are frequently mistreated, and that Mizusaki might not understand what it means to eke out a living like that— but the idea never occurs to them.
Ugly Cute: Kanamori and Asakusa are not conventionally attractive female characters (especially by the standards of anime and manga, which tend to rely heavily on Generic Cuteness regardless of a work's genre), but their awkward proportions, visually distinctive designs, and contrasting personalities are exactly what endeared them to the fandom.
Values Dissonance: The series depicts the animation industry through a lens of Japanese Confucianism, consistently depicting Asakusa and Mizusaki (and by implication, animators in general) as only having themselves to blame for their hardships in part due to their lack of compliance with Kanamori, who stands above them in the Confucian natural order as their producer. The western perspective, meanwhile, is that it's often the superiors (e.g. producers or executives) who are responsible for workplace hardship, with the workers often being overworked and underpaid. Consequently, some western reviewers have criticized the series for misrepresenting the industry as a result of this difference in cultural philosophy.
Viewer Gender Confusion:
- When the trailers released, quite a few fans mistook Asakusa to be a boy due to her Tomboyish Voice and androgynous appearance. According to an interview with animator Mari Motohashi, the three main characters are animated with a "gender neutral" feel in mind and the staff was instructed to avoid making the characters' poses and expressions "girlish," so this isn't too surprising.
- Doumeki takes this even further with her even more androgynous appearance, clothing, and voice, making her an easy candidate to be mistaken for a boy. However, this is mitigated by her almost always being seen in a female school uniform following her debut appearance.
Woolseyism: Sowande at one point calls Kanamori "Kanemori-chan", riffing on the latter's love of money (as "kane" is Japanese for "money") and playing off of how "Kanamori" is derived from the kanji for "gold forest" (with "kana" being the Japanese word for "gold"). Crunchyroll's English subtitles translate the quip as "Kanamoney," which carries over the wordplay but lacks the insult that comes from Sowande intentionally using the honorific "-chan" in an inappropriate manner (as Sowande and Kanamori aren't particularly close). Crunchyroll's Spanish subs, meanwhile, go with "Platamori," which manages to successfully play off of the meaning of "Kanamori," roll off the tongue fairly well, and act as a well-placed subtle jab (as "plata" is the Spanish word for silver, which is traditionally regarded as less valuable than gold).

YMMV / Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

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