天下制覇

God forbid anything actually happens.

Impressions:

Let me get this straight. Shouma was in the room next door to Ringo the entire time? Then walks in, slips on a bottle, knocks himself out and Yuri just suddenly stops caring and wanders off? And Masako was there too? In fact, I think there were more members of the cast AT the hot springs than not. I’m not sure why I expected any otherwise considering that every other cliffhanger in this show has been resolved by the overwhelming power of plot contrivance. This was made worse by being another flashback-dominated episode putting the actual plot on hold to make up new past motivations that have apparently been ignored for years but are now totally completely relevant. Yuri’s sculpture crap wasn’t even the stupidest flashback though. No, that reward goes to the one a few seconds into the episode where the flashback sign took longer to display than the flashback itself, which was made up of 100% recycled footage in case you had forgotten the entire first third of last week.

And then we get into Yuri’s flashback, about eeeeevil daddy who was an artist desiring perfection, and because there was something wrong with her, he abused her. But then there’s the glorious Lady Madonna, bringer of all that is  good in the world, destroyer of towers, who will totally not turn out to be an over-idealized figure that betrays the entire cast’s obsessions with her Momoka, who can see her true inner beauty and blah blah blah, "she said I was pretty, so I will now proceed to devote my entire life." And then the status quo was completely restored having done nothing but spew out a flashback of yet another character having daddy issues. Mix it up, why don’t you? How about a character with mother issues? Oh wait, that would ruin glorious Lady Madonna, bringer of all that is  good in the world, destroyer of towers, who will totally not turn out to be an over-idealized figure that betrays the entire cast’s obsessions with her deep and intricate symbolism of Momoka as mooooommy. It’s a Jesus allegory, it must be deep.

I think that’s the final straw. The bottom line is that I still don’t care a whit about a single character, the themes that interested me at the start have been completely abandoned for an endless string of flashbacks about how nobody’s dad loves them enough, and after resorting to convenient plot machination to restore the status quo again and again and again, I see absolutely no reason that the show won’t be continuing to rely on that right up to whatever the overly-pretentious finale about destiny will be. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination, and all this show has are its gimmicks. They’ve worn beyond thin and I do not feel like suffering through another two months of resets until the show finally runs out of episodes and can’t reset whatever its final cliffhanger will be.