

If you've seen CosPrayers, you probably remember it as one of the worst anime
you've watched. The story made no sense, with many important story elements
being cut out entirely. The characters had no personality, terrible acting,
and their actions didn't make sense. There was pretty much no explanation for
what was happening either. The camera angles were strange. The random
fanservice also kills any attempt at a serious tone, but the show seems to be
trying to take itself seriously. It's just all-around a bad show.
[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cosmopolitan_Prayers) even claims
that the show spawned a minor meme "Worse than CosPrayers" to describe
incredibly terrible shows.

If that were all, then we could just write off the show as one of anime's
great failures, but the abomination continued with [Smash
Hit!](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hit_o_Nerae!) ( _Hit wo Nerae!_ ) and
[LOVE♥LOVE?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Love?). These series were aired
in sequence immediately after CosPrayers and produced by the same people. In
them, CosPrayers is a live-action television show, and both shows are about
the production of CosPrayers. It is plagued with numerous problems, including
poor management, lack of experience of the producers, unsuitable content, and
even actresses seducing the screenwriter to try to get more screentime.

If a real show was plagued with so many problems, I imagine the result would
be pretty bad. So it's almost understandable why CosPrayers was so bad,
especially if it was intended to add to the story of the other two series.
However, if that was their goal, I'd imagine that airing CosPrayers last,
rather than first of the three, would be the better approach. It's also rather
unbelievable that a studio would create a bad show deliberately, since I can't
imagine they'd expect to make money off of it. Still, the show seems almost
too bad to be true, and some forum posts online claim that it was deliberately
made that way to match the other two series better.

Is there any evidence suggesting that CosPrayers was made to be a bad show,
and the problems plaguing it were deliberate? Or is this just "fan"
speculation?


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anime-production love-love cosprayers smash-hit
Was CosPrayers deliberately bad?


Having checked [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosprayers),
[TVTropes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/CosPrayers), the
[official
website](http://web.archive.org/web/20070220172341/http://www.ponycanyon.co.jp/pc-
moe/cosprayers/) (via Wayback Machine), and [Anime News
Network](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=3460),
there was no information on this. Even if the show was deliberately made to be
bad, it's likely that the production company wouldn't reveal that fact, so
we'd have no way of knowing. Hence, there's probably no definitive answer to
this.

However, the sorts of problems in the show aren't the sorts which one would
deliberately create if the show was deliberately made to be bad. The show
primarily suffers from an incoherent plot, as well as bland characters. But it
doesn't seem to be deliberately incoherent; rather, they had no room to fit
any plot in the short time that was allotted. This is evidenced by the fact
that there are flashbacks to scenes which never took place on camera. Probably
there was initially some attempt at a plot, but crucial pieces were cut during
production.

It's also notable that the show, while terrible, isn't anywhere near the worst
anime ever. If the production team was deliberately trying to make a bad
anime, they could have done even worse, e.g. by using worse artwork or adding
more plot holes. There's nothing good about Cosprayers, but there's plenty
that could still be worse. As Jon Lin noted in the comments, M.O.E. (the
studio responsible for Cosprayers) has done plenty of mediocre anime, and
Cosprayers could easily just be somewhere on the low tail end of the
distribution without being deliberately made to be bad.

Finally, as I noted in the question, it doesn't make any sense why Cosprayers
would be aired before Smash Hit! and LOVE♥LOVE? if they were making it
deliberately bad. The better strategy from a production point-of-view would be
to air it the last of the three.

It's worth noting that at least one guy on the internet agrees with me. [This
review](http://the-sun-is-up.dreamwidth.org/65427.html) of Cosprayers
discusses whether the show is intentionally bad or not in the final paragraph:

> But back to that question of the parody retcon: According to Wikipedia,
> Smash Hit premiered only a week after CosPrayers ended, so it does seem
> possible that the producers had planned all along for CosPrayers to be
> crappy. But if that's the case, they're _still_ complete blockheads. First
> of all, where's the sense in airing the intentionally sucky show-within-a-
> show _before_ airing the making-of show that gives it context? Your audience
> will get bored and/or annoyed and go off to watch something else long before
> you have a chance to reveal the whole "it was supposed to be crap all
> along!" twist. And secondly, **a crappy work does not automatically get any
> less crappy just because you made it crappy on purpose.** If you sing a song
> horrendously off-key, it doesn't matter whether you did it because you're
> tone-deaf or because you're doing it intentionally to make some point —
> either way, it's still going to make my ears bleed. Being sucky on purpose
> isn't enough by itself — you have be _entertainingly_ sucky, and preferably
> also include some satire on the sucky thing that you're imitating. Plus, I
> don't think CosPrayers is outlandish enough in its suckiness to qualify for
> the "haha sucky on purpose" crowd. Simply put, it's not bad enough. Despite
> that "worse than CosPrayers" meme, it's not the worst anime out there, nor
> is it even the worst I've seen. It's just kind of mediocre and incoherent.
> It fails even at being legendarily awful.

There are some sources which make the opposite claim, but neither side has any
direct evidence. With that in mind, I'm of the opinion that while we can't
know for certain, based on the above evidence it's very likely that the show
was not intentionally bad.


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