Well, Rance 4 is still stalling me like a pro, so it’s time to move on and give something else a chance.

Oh, this is something I’ve been wanting to do since forever.  It’s time to crack open… Fairy Dust’s Cream Lemon.

First, a word about Lemon People magazine.  It was a long-running anthology magazine that ran from 1982 to 1998.  It was sexual, it was loli, and it was very, very influential.  Many of the stories that ran in Lemon People were adapted to animation as part of the Cream Lemon hentai OVA series.  Not all Cream Lemon stories originated from Lemon People, however, and not all anime adaptations that originated from Lemon People are necessarily Cream Lemon.  Hades Project Zeorymer and Iczer-One are among the series that span off from Lemon People.  It’s no surprise that a number of talents that worked on Lemon People went on to do a lot of great non-hentai work.  For me, by far the most notable is Narumi Kakinouchi, who wrote Vampire Princess Miyu (a manga which continues to elude me to this day.  Why did you have to go, Studio Ironcat?!)

Cream Lemon is pretty much an anthology anime.  Only a handful of episodes got revisited, and off the top of my head, only the Ami series and Escalation series got more than two episodes.

Cream Lemon is classified into 5 “series:” Cream Lemon, New Cream Lemon, Ami Series, Best Hits, and… Misc. Specials.  Yeah, not much of a name, that last one.  New Century Cream Lemon is a pair of OVAs released in 2001-02, and it’s pretty much just a remake of the first Ami and Escalation episodes.  They were okay.

[lamonae] thankfully did the world a huge favor by fansubbing Cream Lemon and New Cream Lemon into English a few years ago.  It’s not EVERYTHING, but 24/40 ain’t half bad.  Hell, it’s 22 more episodes in English than there were when I first watched all of Cream Lemon.

So anyway… yeah.  There’s 40 episodes between Cream Lemon and New Century.  Might as well start now.

The first episode, Be My Baby, was released in August 11, 1984.  Ha ha… I’m going to review hentai that predates myself.  That’s not creepy or weird at all.

So we start the episode off being introduced to Ami, a girl who has a brother she adores.

Ami and Hiroshi have the same father and live with Hiroshi’s mother. And before I continue on, I have to address one of the weirdest close-ups I’ve ever seen.

Ami seems attached to Hiroshi and talks about how great he is, but he acts a little distant.  It doesn’t take long before we get hints that he’s distant because Ami and Hiroshi have an awkward attraction to each other that Hiroshi is more aware of.

Ami isn’t fully cognizant of her own feelings toward her brother, but she does feel a tinge of jealousy when girls around her fawn over Hiroshi.  Like her friends.  Or some girl standing next to her.  Seriously, Ami watches his brother running track, notices a girl next to her also watching him, and out of nowhere, she introduces herself to Ami and hands a love letter to her.  After watching Hiroshi a bit more, she goes “fuck that.”

Before they know it, their mutual attraction for each other has caused a distance between them that gets worse the more they try to deny their feelings.  That night, they seem to make up for whatever the cause of this distance is.  Then Hiroshi peeks in on Ami while she showers… and masturbates to her brother.

Kind of out of nowhere, we see what appears to be a flashback of Ami and Hiroshi while they were younger (like… 10 years old kind of younger) when Hiroshi made Ami show him her private parts.  Yeah.  It’s… immensely creepy – both the memory itself and the fact that Ami is pleasuring herself to it.

Shortly after she climaxes, she hears the door shut and realizes… maybe her brother saw all that.  The next scene, she passes by her brother silently and… goes into her room and casually brushes her hair.  Okay.  Then right after, Hiroshi turns on his stereo and enters Ami’s room.  …O…kay…

So… yeah.  Hiroshi kinda forces himself on his sister, who says no but really means yes (which the audience knows, but Hiroshi… okay, he knows, but only because he watched his sister masturbate to him).  This leads into a consensual love-making scene that’s hotter than it has any right being… though one wonders just how consensual it is now that we know that Ami is confusing a a childhood trauma with love and Hiroshi just decided to stop suppressing his lust for his sister.  Or am I the only one that chooses to see it that way?

So while Hiroshi and Ami are humping like crazy, they fail to realize that Hiroshi’s stereo stopped blaring music a LOOOOONG time ago.  Hiroshi’s mother knocks on the door asking why Ami is screaming, and the episode ends fading out on the door.

The animation is overall pretty bad, with lots of recycled footage (which is ridiculous for a 22-minute episode), and I found it hard to root for the main couple for… many, many reasons.  But the sex scene is ridiculously good, the drama is surprisingly effective, and dat ending… just dat ending.  All things considered, this actually ended up being one of my favorite incest stories, though that’s primarily due to my overall disdain for the subject in pretty much every other instance (I think the only other incest story I liked was Angel Sanctuary, and I liked it for several other awesome reasons).  I mean, I’ll accept incest as a catalyst to get some well-drawn hentai scenes started, but I’ve never been a fan of it in and of itself.

Anyway, the later Ami episodes add a world of complexity to the cast and delivers an unexpectedly compelling relationship drama, and this first episode deserves props for laying down the groundwork for that.  I sure as hell didn’t see it coming.