天下制覇

It may contain unexpected clauses!

FYI, this and DS2’s broadcasts are pushed back a little bit (again) next week.

Impressions:

Is it really so much to ask that a show manage to both be eventful and sensical? Well, maybe this one is just out of control enough to get by on sheer inanity. Yeah, yeah, starting off with the usual info dump into eating contest into a knifing, which means… That it’s time to pan over an entire swarm of characters, and do some particularly weird classroom teenage kissy face nonsense. They just left two bodies floating in a corridor in zero G, blood splattered everywhere, and continued on their day. Wouldn’t like… someone notice this? Even the kissy face stuff was a bit inane. They went straight from secretly texting in the middle of class to crawling around the classroom to hopping around. Did we forget something along the way? I’m also a little confused as to why students were running around on top of gun turrets.

The worst was probably Shouko getting lasered. Our whiny spineless protagonist had the wherewithal to not only give a scream of anguish but make comments like "Quit paying hide and seek," making me want to slap him even more. And of course, as you know, the Japanese response to going into emotional shock is to calmly climb into a nearby robot that popped up out of nowhere, boot it up, and obey the sexy little AI interface asking you to "resign as a human being," But not until you have at least 100 Twitter followers. And then after it’s all over, he’s stabbed dead, and shot a few times because the terrorists know what they’re doing. Except that he gets up because his robot has turned him into a vampire.

So yeah, to say that there are issues with the writing is like noting that water is wet. Even Guilty Crown managed to be cohesive for at least one episode. It’s eventful at least, and that’s something. I have to admit that I laughed like a moron at the end of the episode though. Nobody expects the vampire! The protagonist is almost a direct copy of Shu from Guilty Crown otherwise though. Granted, his girlfriend being ‘dead’ of a laser blast meters away from her is both a valid reason for a little melodrama and also not terribly convincing (especially with vampires in the show), but it’s not like he wasn’t a sniveling little whiner beforehand though. Production is also a little disappointing. Nowhere even close to cheap, but Sunrise has done much better CG in the past than those ugly blocky ships and nothing really impressed otherwise, which is kind of odd for them.

But seriously. A vampire.