YEAR 2005: BLUDGEONING ANGEL DOKURO-CHAN

Where possible I generally try to list a femme formidable's first appearance in any medium before moving on to secondary appearances.  However, the subject I've chosen for 2005 first appeared in a Japanese "light novel," which to my knowledge has not been translated and probably won't be in the near future.  Since there will be other cases where I'll have no knowledge of the first medium-- as with video games-- this will be one place where I feel justified in leapfrogging over the original media-appearance, and going to the only version currently available: an anime adaptation.

While typing nationalities is generally a no-no, I don't think it unfair to state that certain nationalities excel in particular departments.  For whatever reason, Japanese popular entertainers of the 20th and 21st centuries excel at creating scenarios of extreme sadism, sometimes for the purpose of slapstick comedy.  BLUDGEONING ANGEL DOKURO-CHAN is one example of this trend.

The basic plot is simple albeit thoroughly bizarre. Male high school student Sakura Kusakabe finds himself forced to live with an "angel" named Dokuro Mitsukai.  She tells him that in the future he's destined to invent a serum that will retard aging in females, so that the feminine gender will become dominated by "Lolitas."  Dokuro is initially sent to kill Sakura, but she decides simply to live with and monitor him instead.  However, she frequently teases him sexually, and then punishes him for his reactions by clubbing him into bloody rags with her magical spiked bat "Excalibolg."  Following each execution, she brings him back to life none the worse for wear, though Sakura apparently retains his memories of every destructive experience.

There's absolutely no depth to all of this psycho-slapstick, in contrast to some of the more psychologically insightful moments of URUSEI YATSURA or the more recent LOVE HINA.  Its main virtue lies in the artists' ability to come up with new scenarios of absurd torture, so it may prove rather repetitive even for lovers of this sort of weirdness.