Guys, I need to talk about this anime I just watched...

When I first heard of "Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma" I was ecstatic. I have always loved shonen anime for it's over the top interpretation of just about everything, from sports to playing Justice League with your classmates. I could go on for an entire post about my favorite tropes from that genre, but I really just want to talk about this one show for now. You see, picturing something I really enjoy doing (cooking) through the lens of shonen anime was an attractive prospect, so I was excited to check it out immediately when I first heard of it. When I did, though, I had a lot of thoughts getting in the way of the show itself. What do I mean? Well...

(CW: Rape, Spoilers Ahead)

The first word of the entire show is DISGUSTING! Apparently the protagonist, Souma Yukihira made a ridiculous cooking choice, pairing squid with peanut butter sauce. How anyone with functioning taste buds could think this is a good idea is beyond me. Maybe this character is terrible at everything and won't actually learn to cook until later? He shakes off this blatantly poor choice rather quickly when he hears that a friend of his has come to visit. This is where it starts to get weird. Souma and his father, Jouichiro both cook up two identical plates of fried rice and offer them to this friend, Mayumi, to taste it.

A crowd forms around Mayumi as she tries to figure out which plate of rice to taste first. As it turns out, cooking competitions between Souma and his father are common at this restaurant. When Mayumi takes her first bite, her skin becomes flushed and she starts to rub her legs together while panting. Clearly someone slipped an aphrodisiac into his dish. Mayumi judges the older chef's dish to be the clear winner and Souma throws a fit over losing to a more experienced cook, clearly not for the first time. How he thought he was going to win when peanut butter squid actually has a place in his repertoire is beyond me. Dad tells Souma that he needs more training, then immediately proceeds to gloat about how he, a professional restrateur beat his son at his own job. Souma has lost nearly 500 food battles against dear old dad, or 489 to be be painfully specific. As if a difference of 11 on that scale is worth pointing out.

Everyone in the restauraunt digs into some rice of their own and everyone loses their shit. A zipper pops, a girl's butt pulses, and everyone's faces melt into complete bliss. Someone help! I think this man is drugging the kids! Meanwhile, Mayumi tries to comfort Souma, who takes his 489th loss about as well as I do whenever I lost a pet. This triggers what is easily the most disturbing part of the episode, when Souma seems to punish his friend for judging him to be the loser by force-feeding her one of his nasty squid tentacles. As if that wasn't creepy enough for you, what follows is a visual of the girl being raped by a giant squid, thus making the symbolic shittiness of jamming slightly phallic food into a girl's mouth seem slightly more literal.

After the squid rape, other people moan about how Souma likes to share his mistakes with people (whether they like it or not) and papa reminisces about the time he tried to mix dried sardines with strawberries, which leads to an argument about whose shitty dish was shittier.

Then comes the opening, which is fairly decent. It sort of showcases the premise of the show in all its simplicity. "We are going to make cooking look epic."

After the opening, the show cuts to a dinner rush at the same restaurant. The customers eventually leave, satisfied, but the first sign of trouble comes when we find a limo outside, where a woman with dark glasses stares intently at the building. Presumably not much later, Souma and his dad are cleaning up after closing, while our protagonist thinks about his future after middle school. He has a lot of pride in the family restaurant and hopes to hone his cooking skills there so he can surpass his dad's skill and take over as the chef for his restaurant. This is when the woman from the car enters and introduces herself as an urban planner named Minegasaki. Clearly they know, as neither of them look happy to see her or the three suits that are following her. Clearly, Souma is unimpressed with her ability to make her boobs move by pulling off her sunglasses.

Minegasaki reveals to the audience (and for some reason, the same people she has spoken to on at least one other occasion about the same thing) that she is looking to buy out the restaurant to build a huge condo building in its place. Souma refuses to sell his father's restaurant, and the woman makes a thinly-veiled threat of sabotage while goading him into agreeing to close the restauraunt if they ever failed to give someone the food they want. Question: Why the hell is this middle schooler having this conversation and not the dad and why is he making bold claims on behalf of his father's business?

The next day, Souma is walking home from school when he receives a phone call from his dad telling him not to even bother opening the restaurant today because he's at a meeting. He then asks what Souma's plans are after middle school and hangs up after being told he wants to keep learning to cook in the restaurant. He's definitely in the middle of selling the restaurant so his son will go to high school, which is fantastic because I'm tired of typing restaurant and refuse to do so anymore for the rest of this post.

Souma enters the eatery to find all of their meat has become completely useless. Who could have seen that sabotage coming? The sign on the awning was painted over and Ms. Minegasaki shows up to gloat. Too bad he has to put up with it that knowing full well she totally screwed them. She then follows himself inside to demand a tasty meat dish from a place of business that isn't even open and laughs because she obviously knows what happened in the freezer. The protagonist demands that she stake her right to walk into the eatery that she's actively trying to close so she can tear down the building on her certainty that he can't create a satisfying meal and the battle is ON. Cue the epic anime wind as he puts on his apron and headband in a series of classic shonen anime action shots.

The stupid land shark is surprised to see him cooking like a champ, but is confused that he's even trying since she definitely knows what happened to the fridge and Souma fails to see anything suspicious about that. An unspecified--but probably an unrealistic amount of-- time later, Souma whips out a beautiful pork roast and I'm getting hungry. I don't know what I was thinking trying to watch this show on an empty stomach. Surprise! It's not a pork roast at all, but potatoes wrapped in fresh bacon he just brought home from the store! This is technically what Minegasaki asked for, and the dish will be getting no complaints from me, but she is PISSED. She declares his dish a failure while ignoring the meat right in front of her. She then goes into a rant about the virtues of gentrification while demanding the eatery-- that the protagonist, again, has no control over and which wasn't obligated to give her a damn thing in the first place because it wasn't open--be closed on the spot.

Minegasaki finally tries the roast and it's so good that her breasts start to bounce on their own, independently of one another as she rubs her legs together. She came in hungry, but now she's dying of THIRST. After explaining the process of how he made the meal point by point with a smirk, Souma is sure he's won, but the land shark isn't giving up that easily! She tries to argue that the "roast" isn't technically a meat dish, but changes her tune immediately when the protagonist takes her plate and threatens to toss it in the garbage. When she relents, the protagonist returns the plate and sets it down with enough force to cause a small whirlwind. I'd wonder what that plate is made of, but I'm too busy shaking my head because the food is almost certainly cold now.

Minegasaki takes another bite, as do each of her henchman, and I nearly lost it because the food was so good that the most epic fanservice moment of the episode commences. Every single one of them is thrown into an orgasmic nirvana so mind blowing, their clothes EXPLODE. Apparently business suits are prone to decide you no longer need them when you experience the ultimate flavor of bacon and potatoes. They share an intense group orgasm while screaming "MEAT JUICES!" His work done, Souma whips off his headband while the bad guys lie on the floor in post-culinary bliss, their clothes magically returned to normal.

Later, Souma is seen cleaning the eatery's vandalized sign when his dad returns and announces that he will, in fact, be closing the eatery. Not because he sold it, but because he took another job that he expects to tie him up for a couple of years. He doesn't waste much time leaving and it looks like the boy will have to go to high school after all! May the gods (of Comalan!) have mercy on his soul. As it turns out, he is a real brat about having to go to culinary school. It's clear that he has low expectations of the curriculum ahead. That is until he finds a bunch of people sobbing just outside the school, languishing in their various failures. He calls his dad and finds out the old man just forgot to mention that he just sent his son to the top culinary school in the country. Oops! And that's where the first episode ends.

Too be honest, I don't know if I'm going to watch another episode. I really want to like this show for combining two of my great loves, but I can't really do so unironically with this level of fanservice. I probably won't be going on any Food Wars binges, but if anyone likes this review, perhaps I'll keep watching just to dunk on it.