What do you dislike about Yoshio? I stopped keeping up a long time ago (around Bell Tree Express) and for the anime, much earlier, I just now later anime originals were usually not great, with a few nice exceptions...
In super short: we don't like his episodes because he ignores established characterization to be able to make jokes, and his jokes are extremely juvenile. He seems to think old people are inherently funny, he seems to think scatological humor is the height of comedy, and that having characters wildly gesticulate or dance is a sure recipe for hilarity. It's a type of humor that, beyond being extremely juvenile, also reads to us as mocking and mean-spirited, as the targets of his humor are portrayed as laughable, vapid, stupid, gay, and/or old. Which is gross and we don't want to pollute ourselves with this stuff. So, since all of his episodes are anyway out-of-character excursions mostly just to make fun of old people, we decided to skip them entirely.
Our first incident with this guy's writing does not even come from Detective Conan, but from Digimon 02. I don't know how familiar you are with it, but the first arc's plotline is about Ken, a child genius in the real world becoming an evil dictator in the digital world. He doesn't understand that he's not simply playing a videogame, and when he finally realizes the truth, there are serious repercussions for Ken that he now has to face. And then there is an absolutely heartbreaking episode about Ken's trauma about the death of his older brother and how he has been in the role of replacing his dead older brother, which has been unaddressed and festering and at the core of all of his problems.
And sandwiched right between the episode where Ken found out after fucking around for the whole first half of the series, and the trauma backstory episode, there is an episode that was written by this guy (although we didn't learn that tidbit until much later). We pre-emptively apologize for making you read this. The episode is about the main heroes accidentally walking in on an old tortoise digimon who was enjoying a piss. The tortoise is so mad about being interrupted in its joyful piss that it chases the kids for the whole episode. Antics ensue. And whenever the tortoise thinks it's safe to piss, the kids witness it again, restarting the cycle. Eventually the tortoise gets to piss again alone.
We were rewatching Digimon 02 after many years, and when we got to this episode, we stopped. The next day, we just said, …why don't we watch something else.
The first episode he contributed to Detective Conan is the "Tokyo Barls Collection" (episode 943). The entire episode exists solely because of an extended pun between garuzu (transliteration of the English word "girls") and "ba" (Japanese for "old") - what if there was an idol group, consisting of all old ladies, and they were the baruzu? That's the joke. That extremely stretched out pun that barely even counts as a pun. During the episode, we meet the four old ladies, who are all just recolored copies of like, Wendy Oldbag from the Ace Attorney series, and they do dancing antics and are so so so funny because they are so so so old. Kogoro and Conan are also in the episode, but they both act extremely out of character, and they just get to be the vehicle by which we meet these old ladies so we can laugh about how they dance even though they are old.
In the next episode written by this guy (episode 955), the Detective Boys stumble into a village where everyone is dressed in bug mascot costumes, and they participate in a human bug-catching contest, and… weren't we watching a mystery murder series? When we came around again to this episode on our rewatch, we knew we didn't want to see it again, and this time, we went to the wiki to learn some context for this off-the-wall incongruous zaniness, and that's when we realized this bug episode was written by this guy, who is the same guy who wrote the Tokyo Barls… and the pissing tortoise in Digimon 02. And certain episodes of Lupin III red jacket, and we would have to do a whole rewatch of the series to be sure (we do plan to), but in our hazy memories, we have a feeling that our least favorite episodes were written by him. In our opinion, the Lupin III red jacket series has a quality that wildly fluctuates between supremely excellent and absolute shit, and it would only make sense if the absolute shit was contributed by this guy.
So yeah, this information freed us: this man's writing has been our nemesis for our whole lives, and now that we can simply check who was the writer of a certain Detective Conan episode and see it was him, we can decide we don't want to see it. We are in charge of our own destiny. Never again will we be tormented by this man's weird obsessions.
Continuing in our rewatch of Detective Conan, we made it into kind of a game to not check beforehand, but, if we're watching an episode and either of us has the inkling that it's by that guy, we stop and check. And so far we've been right almost every single time, and often within the first 3 minutes. We almost admire the stylistic consistency, except we hate it. For example, we start watching an episode (976), and Kogoro has been hired to find a lost pet armadillo. Ding! Armadillo mentioned. To puerile sensibilities, armadillo is a funny word and a non-standard pet. So we raise our eyebrows. In the next minute, Kogoro searches for the armadillo in the fish market of Tokyo, and insinuates that the armadillo was butchered and sold as tuna, and the fishmongers blast him out of the market with a hose. Ding! Racist joke about foreign meat, and Kogoro is out-of-character, because for all of his vices, Kogoro's greatest skill is being polite and copacetic. Kogoro proceeds to make this same faux pas a few more times, getting blasted out of the market again and again, learning nothing from the experience. Ding! Slapstick comedy and mindless repetition. Defeated, Kogoro decides to leave the fish market and calls a taxi. The taxi driver learns that he's the great Sleeping Kogoro, and turns around in the seat to ask Kogoro if he will marry him, as the car swerves wildly through the highway - but he meant to be present as his wedding, not as the groom. Ding! Homophobic joke, plus more slapstick comedy. By this point we have more than enough evidence, and we stopped watching. This is how episodes with this guy go.
Nobody make this into a drinking game or you'll need to go through the entire Black Organization before the commercial break.
Only in one case did we watch the whole episode and then only at the very end, when people started dancing, we realized it was his work (episode 1119). Though, even the wiki mentions that this episode is unusually sedate and serious for this guy's writing. Maybe he's improving. Maybe people are stepping him to save the show before he kills it. Who knows. Though, it's not like it's a good episode or anything we would particularly want to praise or even rewatch, just one that didn't cross a line for us.
We do want to say that we actually really enjoy a lot of the anime original episodes in Detective Conan, and a big part of why we started doing our ongoing series of anime episode reviews was to talk about the anime original episodes and how some of them are among our top favorite episodes. Some surpass the canon material, in our opinion. After all, the anime is largely responsible for Takagi, Shiratori, Chiba, Azusa, about half of Kogoro, most of Eri as a likeable character and not a nasty appendage of Kogoro, Eri's prosecutor rival Reiko who remains anime-original but is really cool, Fumimaro (or as we call him, "squirrel cop"), and Yuya "Eyebrows" Kazami. So don't let this one guy, who only came in around 2019, cast a shadow over all the good anime-original episodes. There is still plenty of good about the anime series. We still just skip anything that we realize is by this guy.
