On Chobits and Persocoms

An anime showing in our break room (by a geeky coworker with a laptop) resulted in me gaining inadvertent vague familiarity with the opening episodes of CHobits, an anime that revolves around a farmboy turned schoolboy named Hideki who moves to Tokyo, intending on attending prep school so that he can be accepted into a good college. Once there, he discovers that almost everyone else has a persocom (a personal computer and communications device in the form of a pliable, usually female humanoid). As these are all reasonably expensive for a poor student, Hideki fears that he'll never own one - until one night on the way home, he discovers one in a pile of garbage and hauls it home, minus a reasonably important-looking disk.

After the general embarrassment of explaining to his apartment manager and his friend from school that he isn't a pervert despite all evidence to the contrary (apparently a popular theme of the show), he eventually has his new persocom tested - resulting in the burnout of every system connected to her. The most that can be ascertained is that she is incredibly powerful and contains protected data, and that there is an urban legend involving persocoms of legendary power that have free will and emotions - Chobits.

I haven't really watched anything anime-related in quite a while, in part because Laura can't stand the stuff. Therefore, I don't have the necessary mindset cultivated to enjoy conventions of the genre. So far, this is what I've taken from the experience:

* Anime characters have a need to talk to themselves or someone else nearly constantly.
* Farmboys freak out over nearly everything, particularly women.
* 'Mobile' persocoms (still humanoid, but about the size of a kitten) are incredibly energetic - much more than their human-sized counterparts. (You'd think something with a smaller battery wouldn't move and squeal so much.)
* There are three states of arousal: blushing and squinting, blushing and wide-eyed, and bleeding from the nose while collapsing.
* Anime people emote through a combination of elaborate gestures and teleportation.
* Persocom model numbers are usually printed in semi-intimate locations, such that looking can easily be confused with foreplay.
* Persocoms' eyes always appear wet, and shimmer when reading or writing data.
* Persocoms are usually identifiable by weird 'ears' jutting from under their hair.
* Farmboys who have never used a computing device, as well as students with expensiv, fancy, mobile units, both think the first thing to bring up when thinking of things to look up on the Internet is porn sites.
* Japanese citydwellers are incredibly tolerant of people who babble and stare a lot.
* Japanese landlords are incredibly tolerant of their tenants, no matter what they walk in on.
* Preten computer geniuses don't care what you do to their quartet of persocoms in scanty maid outfits as long as you don't get them dirty.
* Subtitles don't always match the audio, even when they're both in the same language.
* "Chi" is the Chobit equivalent of the DOS prompt.
* Diagnostic scans can break computers if the computer being scanned is powerful enough.

Measuring using Laura's standards, on a scale from 0 (complete inoffensiveness) to 10 (deserving of the utter annihilation of Japanese culture), this anime would probably rate a 4 (making her want to neuter the creators to make sure they don't breed.) The plot (from what I saw) is okay - though not particularly inspired, fairly predictable, and massively coincidental - but certain aspects (like searching for a power switch in a persocom's groinal region, the constant pervert ramblings, and the gratuitous babbling about the persocom's breasts) would probably annoy Laura to the point of wanting to neuter the creators.