天下制覇

Your death haunts the entire school’s collective tortured souls.

Impressions:

I’m starting to wonder if these time slip sequences at the start of episodes are just the writers trying to screw with the audience. Then I remember that’d require some actual planning and thought, which these people have so far not shown themselves to be capable of and figure that someone just got some storyboards out of order. The wailing anguish over glasses’s death was as awful as expected. I think my favorite moment of angst was tits sitting in the middle of blood spatter, dabbing it with a hankie. A mop, while more effective, would clearly have not been as angsty as sitting in the middle of blood and crying about it. Also, hasn’t Elfy left like… a literal heap of bodies around the area already? Good god. Even not-Shu shot half a dozen people in the face in front of most of them. They’ve been fighting a war for seven episodes, already screamed in horror over one person’s supposed death as the school was being shelled during the opening salvo, but only now is it super ultra dreadfully serious. Because she was glasses girl.

The angst lead into the fighting about as well as an aperitif of bleach, made even stranger by the whole attack apparently actually being a cover for sneaking about 10 people in while also bombing them from sea. I’m not certain I was aware there was a sea, but I worry about paying too much attention. Everyone was glued to watching the Dynamic Duo fight anyway, so they completely missed all of that. The crowning moment of the episode probably came as Haruto’s magical number drama-inducing meter got too high and a sparkly vision of glasses girl appeared before him and then burst into sparklies, thus giving him the power to give El Senor Elf a speech about hopes and dreams, changing his black heart to good, undoing the straps holding him down, and helping him bathe the mechs so they could win by stabbing themselves plus more insert songs. Oh, and Haruto killed an entire battlefleet full of people while all the students cheered. After spending the first eight minutes crying over one pointless girl’s death, who aside from super-angsty boy, I’d be surprised if they ever mentioned again.

I feel kind of lazy just incredulously summarizing, but eh. It was a little more directed than usual, but the tone is still all over the place and it relies a lot on hoping the audience is as myopic and melodramatic as the cast is. The action’s not enough of a spectacle to carry the show on flash alone, but they’re rigidly bound to a miraculous victory every week which stopped being miraculous about five victories ago. I do appreciate that things happen. It at least makes writing about it easy and fairly enjoyable, but at the same time, they’re stuck in a rather formulaic groove and it’s starting to tire me. I’d like nothing more than if they actually were ambitious instead of simply pretending to be with killing off pointless characters and pretending like it was important or again, the turn-about victories every single week. Sure, it’ll probably blow up in their faces given the lack of displayed talent with writing so far, but for how dicked up a lot of the small details and flash(back/forwards) are in this show, it’s kind of stuck in a rut right now and mostly just killing time with insecurity and angst that is taking the characters and story nowhere.

Next Episode:

Gym coach Elf.