Before I begin, I'd like to bring up the words of a great president. Thomas Jefferson once wrote of rebellion that "the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." This isn't pertinent to the review you're about to read in any way whatsoever; I merely wanted you to go into it thinking I'm intelligent. Because I am, of course. Just continue reading. Please.
DreamNote is a tale of greed, revenge, and redemption—or at least I'd like to say it is. In reality, it's about a home tutor named Masaya who isn't doing his job properly. Instead of trying to teach his students, he's trying to defile their young, innocent bodies. Don't get the wrong idea—this isn't a tale of corruption either. Within the first three minutes, it's clear that he had very little intention of doing his job.
How does Masaya seduce his students? He uses a notebook. This isn't any ordinary notebook though. Think of it like the Bible; it has the power to control millions of people. What makes this notebook so powerful is what happens when you write a girl's name in it. The power of the notebook compels that person to perform whatever actions the writer has written down for her to do. Surprisingly, he wasn't skeptical in the least upon first use of this notebook.
After writing down an action and a student's name, whatever he wrote down happened in one of his tutoring sessions. Logically, my first thought was that he had been the victim of dark sorcery and any minute he would wake up in an alternate reality where the laws of thermodynamics don't apply and sockless elves do the bidding of wizards. After mulling over this, I realized what had really happened; the notebook does in fact work.
So a hedonistic man has acquired a notebook that can make all his dreams come true (hence the title, DreamNote), what happens next? He does just that. Using the power of the notebook, he satisfies his need for pleasure to the fullest. His three partners come from the same family. Two of them are sisters and the third is the mother of the siblings. As the anime progresses, he slowly conquers each girl. In an attempt to mix things up, he chooses a different girl (from the three) and location during each pleasure scene (I don't know what else to call them).
Sometimes it's in a living room. Sometimes it's in a bathroom. Sometimes it's in a park. Sometimes it's in a school. Sometimes it's in a public pool. A public pool is probably the least reasonable place he could pick since he'd have to deal with the possibility of being caught in the act. In his aforementioned lustful state though, reason flew out the window faster than the aborted fetus of my unnamed younger brother.
This anime's attempt at providing variety was a failure. I found myself tired of it all by the time I started the second episode. All I saw was penetration scene after penetration scene. Where the hell is the humor? One good joke would've been enough to keep this viewing experience from being a total waste of time, but it fails to provide even that. How can this OVA expect to attract anime fans outside its target audience when all it has to offer is scenes involving copulation?
Now I'll begin to discuss the thought that's on every reader's mind. DreamNote, as the title might suggest, is a parody of Death Note. It's not a very good one, if you ask me. Firstly, the protagonists are too different. Light, although he was led astray, had good intentions. His ultimate goal was to make the world a better place, even if it meant cleansing the world of evil through murder. Masaya was corrupted to begin with though. His ultimate goal was to make the most out of his skin flute, even if it meant taking the purity of others through rape.
This is one of the reasons I didn't enjoy this anime very much. This man is literally going around raping innocent girls and feels no remorse or guilt towards what he's done. How is he any different from serial killers like Ted Bundy or Ed Gein? Bundy killed people and didn't feel any guilt. Gein would daze out and when he recovered, he would find himself holding dismembered limbs.
It's weird. There are many characters that do bad things, but people still like them. Dexter killed a lot of people, but so many viewers like him. God rained down fire upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but Christians still love him. Alex committed so many crimes, yet viewers actually felt sympathy for him as his life spiraled downwards. Dexter only kills bad people. Sodom and Gomorrah were filled with rapists and murderers. Alex suffered—if he can suffer, he can't be that isolated from our emotions, right? You won't like Masaya though. He's a rapist with no redeeming qualities.
Masaya also seems to be a sadist. In several situations, he uses the power of the notebook to get his victims to a certain location. Once he's accomplished that, he deactivates the notebook's power. If he didn't deactivate the notebook, it wouldn't be rape. After thinking about it, something's become evident to me. Rape means to go against someone's will. Let's say the victim is unconscious. Everything would be fair game because there is no will (obviously the legal system doesn't see it that way). Does that mean rape is okay if certain conditions are met? Of course not, but it is what it is.
Considering his sadistic nature, it would be out of character if he didn't deactivate the notebook. He likes hearing his victims suffer, seeing their tears, and making their lives miserable. By satisfying his sadistic needs, he's also furthering his progress in his pursuit of pleasure. Like Light, people were essentially stepping stones to him. He would make use of them in whatever way he could because they would ultimately bring him one step closer to his goal. People that rely on Machiavellian tactics tend to be misunderstood; they often mean good, but have different ways of showing it. Masaya is an exception to this characterization. He ignores society's most fundamental rules. He lacks any moral restraints. And he can't even begin to appeal to a race of beings whose emotions he knows nothing of.
Freud believed that there's a stage in a human's life where he/she will pursue only the desires of the id. This doesn't mean he thought people would suddenly start raping each other in their twenties. What he was referring to was the earliest part of our lives. When you were a child (i.e. before you even started school), did you listen to others or behave appropriately? If you punched another kid, it's likely that someone told you not to do it again. You probably didn't listen. Skip a few years ahead. If the same thing happened, you'd actually listen to what that person is telling you. This is what Freud meant.
Perhaps the source of Masaya's behavior can be found in stereotypes. You know how colleges are. "You will not scrape the photos of our students and compile them into a website and call it the facebook." You know how pool cleaners are. "At first he came to clean her pool, but then he ended up mopping other things." You know how doctors are. "Suffering from a headache, heartburn, or indigestion? Let's do a proctology exam just to be safe."
Of course, the three previously mentioned stereotypes have nothing to do with this anime. The stereotype that matters pertains to men. Do all men really want to sleep with every woman they see? I don't have an answer to this, but the point I'm trying to make is that Masaya's libido is unbelievably strong. If there was a zombie apocalypse, he'd be the guy who goes around raping zombies. "Hey, where's Masaya?" Then they notice that a zombie is covered in semen. The ideal male protagonist is one that's perverted but isn't too perverted either.
As I watched this anime, there were some things that stuck out to me only because they didn't make sense. Why did the females always narrate what's going on? This might sound strange, but I took notes during this viewing. Here are some quotes I jotted down. "I can feel the sperm inside even with my hand being outside." "Your sperm is leaking out of me." "You impregnated me while everyone was watching." I don't think these are very realistic reactions. If someone impaled you through the heart with their penis, you're not going to be saying, "You stabbed me with your penis!" Besides, you'd probably die the moment the perpetrator (would you rather I say penetrator?) pulls out. What is the most humanly thing to say in situations like these? I have no idea, but I can assure you it's not what the characters in this anime say.
The strangest thing is that Masaya keeps coming back to the family's home. When a tutor is sleeping with your daughter, isn't the most logical thing to do to fire him and report the incident? This isn't what baffled me the most though. What baffled me the most is how he got into university. BY ZEUS' BEARD, DO NOT LET THIS CHILD INTO YOUR SCHOOL. HIDE YOUR WIVES AND CHILDREN; THIS STUDENT SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR THEM. THIS IS ALL I CAN SAY RIGHT NOW; I AM AFRAID HE MIGHT HEAR ME AT ANY MOMENT AND COME FOR MY SCROTUM.
There are some aspects to this anime that one can consider realistic. A minor aspect would be that there was blood when the tutor deflowered the sisters. This isn't anything special though—plenty of anime get that right. The most notable aspect is the fact the victims actually get pregnant. That's right, I finally found an anime that depicts a potential consequence of no-condom intercourse. Now what we need is an anime that depicts the other major consequence: AIDS.
My least favorite part about this anime is the ending. After all the wrongs this tutor committed, he gets away with what he did unscathed. Why didn't anything bad happen to him? They could've dipped his penis into a tub of acid. Or someone could've covered his penis in peanut butter. Then a bunch of stray dogs could come along and bite it off because they can't get enough of that peanut butter. In this genre, they can do whatever the hell they want. It's a shame very few titles take advantage of this.
DreamNote is a failure, perhaps the biggest I've seen since that time my uncle Lester forcibly bred a bull and a goat to try to make a minotaur (needless to say, it didn't work as expected and we quickly drowned the resulting abomination in the nearest well). This anime had the potential to be a decent parody but fails miserably. It only has one thing in common with Death Note: The usage of a notebook to manipulate others. The blame for this failure goes to the genre.
Wondering what a decent parody should be? Well, have you heard of The Phantom of the Opera? They could make a parody of that called The Phantom of the Dong. It would be about a man who wears half of a condom to cover his head because half of his penis was burned during a stage fire during the monologue about the female reproductive organ. Now he spends his time kidnapping ladies and bringing them to his lair in the sewers. It's a bit loose, but it has more going on than this anime does.
If you haven't already figured it out, this is a piece of pornography. And you know how it is with porn. It's easy to find ourselves loosening that belt all too soon and then before we know it, our pants have magically disappeared. But before you go running to the nearest pharmacy and stock up on Kleenex, consider this. Instead of wasting your time on DreamNote, you could do what the majority of people do. Go on sites like PornHub, Brazzers, xHamster, LoveTheCock, or what have you—ah, who am I kidding. Go ahead and get jizzy with it.
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