天下制覇

AKA: "The Student Council’s Discretion – The Record of Hekiyoh School’s (sic) Student Council’s Activities." Yeesh.

Season Premier Disclaimer:

I like to check almost every new show out. The value of a show is in its execution, not its premise. That said, my tastes are mine and mine alone. Some things bother me, some things don’t. I will attempt to be as cogent as possible as to my complaints or compliments for each show, but be aware that my views skew heavily towards the center. Nothing is perfect, nothing is irredeemable. That said, my tastes and my opinions are mine and mine alone and should not be construed as fact or, god help us, some kind of erudite critical analysis of the entire series based on the show’s first 20 minutes. Feel free to leave your own thoughts on the show if you’d like, but invective and similar will be mocked or deleted depending on which amuses me more at the time.

Impressions:

Wow. I kind of hate to admit it, but this was a delightful episode. The art and animation was… not stellar, shall we say, but Deen put together a rather fun little parody filled tongue-in-cheek comedy that cruises right along from joke to joke without ever really stopping to catch its breath. Presentation really is everything. The harem bit, the thing I worried about the most, actually turned out to be rather enjoyable. Ken flat out tells them, and in fact, insists that the rest of the cast is his harem and his goal is a "harem end" with all of them. At the same time, he’s neither lecherous nor overly perverse, and instead goes out of his way to honestly help them out without any ulterior motive. In fact, he reminds me a lot of Golden Boy’s Kintaro, only quite a bit dumber, no toilet fetish, and the girls don’t really mind him all that much. Chizuru and Mifuyu even tease him a lot.

Now onto the bad. Like I said though, the production is… not stellar. Deen makes up for a lot of it with parody and a very fluid art style letting them parody a lot of things without abandoning the overall presentation, but there are still a lot of shots that just plain look ugly. I have absolutely no memory of the music not five minutes after I finished watching the episode, so I guess it served its purpose and neither bothered nor entranced me. The voicing could also use a bit of work. This is mostly a novice cast and it shows. Hopefully they’ll step up into their roles a little bit better as we go, but this wasn’t a great first impression on that front.

So, amazingly, the underdog’s winning so far for my Friday pick. I laughed a lot through most of the episode, Ken’s a great male lead, and while the girls are mostly pretty cookie cutter, Mifuyu and Chizuru had some very good moments this week. Unless this takes a nose dive next week, this is looking like something I’ll definitely be following for this season.

Preview:

Kurimu’s depression.