There seems to be a bit of selective memory going on when poeple describe how they came to watch the Candy Boy anime; sheepishly wondering how something like this could ever end up on their playlist. I watched it because of Tumblr, and like the slice of that site that I subscribe to, the series looks, in screenshots at least, very good if slightly dated now just over six years later. Even for an animation clod like me though, once you start watching it (however did this end up here?!) you realise the seven/nine/ten episode series is little more than a very pretty slideshow.
It’s a small step up from the “drama” extras you get on the home video releases of some series (Code Geass’ Nunnally in Wonderland springs instantly to mind): copious dialogue over a handful of still images. Candy Boy manages some animation - mostly cheek pulling and flapping mouths - but lives up to its subtitle: “Nonchalant talk of the certain twin sisters in daily life”.
In a nutshell it’s about well-dressed twin sisters who have moved to Tokyo for highschool and the tribulations of their privileged lives. Except in somewhat of an irony given its title, the series in fact contains no boys whatsoever. And the sisters are close. A little too close you might say if describing them as a scene in a horror movie. It’s heavily implied, but never canonically demonstrated, that Yukino and Kanade are romantically entangled, given that the only other main character, Sakuya, is an unabashed stalker of Kanade and there is a general acceptance (borderline indifference) of same-sex couples by other members of the student body. The situation is a lot like the Higgs Boson prior to the LHC experiments, all the signs point to it being there, it just needs to be proved. With a particle accelerator.
As with Sakura Trick, which was definitely about lesbians, I can’t make an informed “head” decision as to whether the kind of relationship Kanade and Yukino share is amorous or just excessive familiarity given they are twins. Of course my “gut” decision would be that of course they’re romantically involved because this is anime and, perhaps more pointedly, I can’t see a relationship with such affection as anything else.
My issue with them being lovers has everything to do with, like I’ve implied before with Kiss × Sis and recently with Photo Kano, incest still being one of the great taboos. Whether with biological or inherited relatives it still generates a visceral reaction, regardless of how it’s dressed up - which with Candy Boy is with well-to-do ladies decked out in trendy Tokyo fashion. That blending of the forbidden, in this case a family member, with the intimate is obviously ripe for titillation - understandable if the series were more explicit, but it seems to put on airs of seriousness so it remains coy rather than overt. It’s what many series with same sex couples tend to do and it’s often left to the volume of evidence or a message from the creator to establish something more than queer baiting.
I say many other series, Inugami-san to Nekoyama-san certainly doesn’t. It spends its first thirty seconds introducing you to its hook before going hell-for-leather with the female cast fawning over and, sometimes quite literally, pawing at one another. Well, not the entire cast, one character at least has to play the straight woman to the antics of the others. So the lead pairing of Yachiyo and Suzu - the dog-like cat lover and cat-like dog lover respectively - plays similarly to Candy Boy’s Sakuya and Kanade with overenthusiastic overtures from one party and mostly blithe indifference from the other. It’s certainly not a new setup but somewhat perplexing given that if you switched one of the genders, turning it from a homosexual to a heterosexual pairing, it would be more creepy than cute.
Inugami at least has a modicum of humour (despite what fan subtitling group Commie would say) with rapid fire sight-gags aplenty and, crucially at only three and a half minutes for each episode, doesn’t outstay its welcome like Candy Boy does at fifteen, every episode burdened with pretty but protracted shots of nothing inparticular. Although, that’s kind of like saying that being punched for three and a half rather than fifteen minutes is better because it’s shorter, fundamentally you’re still being punched.
It’s easy not to think of either Inugami or Candy Boy as “real shows” which raises the question of what a “real show” actually consists of. I ended up treating Inugami as an aperitif before viewing other series primarily because of its short runtime and generally happy demeanour. Candy Boy on the other hand never feels cohesive or interesting enough, coupled with a slightly bad natured story of snotty rich twins the result is something that’s statically gorgeous but stupendously dull.