When it comes to concepts related to fanservice in anime, there are some that are very hard to do well. One of them, probably the biggest one of them, is what I call “Sexual Slapstick.” It’s someone walking into a room and seeing someone undressing, or tripping and falling and copping a feel (or seeing something they shouldn’t. They’re all based around acts that are gross, which means it can be hard to make funny. Season one of We Never Learn did it and What the Hell Are You Doing Here, Teacher? also manages to actually pull it off.
The anime is basically made up of a series of vignettes all based around a common premise – a male student (generally in their senior year of High School) is in a situation with a female teacher. Both parties have crushes on the other but are afraid to act.
Then, an inciting starts the slapstick in motion: the teacher takes shelter in a laundromat after getting drenched in a rainstorm (soaking their top) and the student is doing their laundry there, the teacher is asked by the student’s mother to help watch the student’s younger sibling leaving both of them in close proximity to each other and alone in the house, and so on. Things escalate apace from there, ending up with the teacher either nude or mostly nude, and the student ending up doing something that ends up accidentally getting the teacher’s rocks off.
However, at no point in the process is the teacher angry, nor do they reject the event necessarily. Any hesitance by the teacher is generally explicitly stated, by the teacher through their internal monologue, as being due to risk of discovery and if that risk was removed, they would otherwise be okay with the situation.
Where the show gets weird is the fact that this aired on television. Taken in isolation, this seems like a really good premise for a hentai anime or an eromanga. In all seriousness, all you would need to do in order to make that leap is to have each scenario escalate into the characters actually having sex. The show never actually goes that far.
On top of all of that, there is very, very heavy use of censorship images in the anime – starting from censor images over (to use the Tumblr terminology) “Female presenting nipples”, to full-screen images during “buffalo shots” (to use the MST3K terminology) to, absurdly enough, kissing (but not hand-holding).
I mean, the show works, both as a sexy romance as a slapstick comedy, but I also feel like it would work better once the uncensored release came out (if an uncensored release comes out), or at least a release with censorship that takes up less screen real-estate. We’ll have to see.
Currently, What the Hell Are You Doing Here, Teacher? is currently only available for streaming on HiDive. There is a manga (which, going from the excerpts I’ve seen, is not as aggressively censored, and actually gets more sexual than the anime) – but it has not been licensed for an English language release as yet.
