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And yet, I’m not prepared to say that was the stupidest thing in this episode.

GeneiTaiyo’s pre-air special came with a rather extensive clip of the first episode. It’s… not the most exciting thing unfortunately, but does have tentacle rape.

Impressions:

This is their latest plan? To heat up giant stamp pads and then stamp the giant robots? Dr. Wily comes up with more menacing ideas. Thank god they didn’t spend much time on that genius development. Maybe I just haven’t been paying attention (which is likely), but the direction in those fights got a bit weird too. Have they always been using those weird-ass cut-ins where profiles just sort of burst into the foreground? The prize for the episode probably has to go to Haruto tackling Captain Eyepatch and giving his manbreasts a good groping. He can’t even tackle people right, but apparently it was good enough, because all Captain Eyepatch did was give up and let his former boyish lover wander off. You might have thought that would have been a perfect chance for body switching too, but that’d just be silly.

And of course, the big climactic moment where Shoko made pillow fort girl feel all better was her panning for a camera saying that they’re friends, thus (once Shoko was harmed), allowing her to overcome her fear and leave her pillow fort, amid horrid flashbacks of being bullied. That’s right. If you thought the main thing of this episode was about dead fathers, ill conceived weddings to your rape victim, or robots fighting, you were wrong. It was about crazy girl being bullied by random people in the past and overcoming her fear of… I’m not exactly sure what, and finding another robot that conveniently fell right into her lap to save the day. With a magical stick in perhaps the most ridiculous scene of the whole episode. She just whapped the evil giant drill twice and stared at it, which made it go backwards while the insert song kicked in.

Also, Captain Eyepatch is a space wizard who flies a robot with the AI’s bitchy brother using what appeared to be hair. This is the cliffhanger between seasons that they decided to go with. Yes, I am counting that as less ridiculous than "Magic robot stick."

Next Season Preview:

No more school.

‘Final’ Thoughts:

It’s picking right back up after a season off, but hey, I may as well post something, as unsurprising as it may be. The action is well animated, but becomes token and boring through stalely rehashing the same cycle every episode. The characters are all gibbering inane monkeys that exist in a world outside of logic that makes them impossible to have any sympathy for, not to mention that there’s too damn many of them without enough focus or structure to make a single one matter. The main gimmicks of the plot go almost completely unused, or when they are, they rarely make sense either. It’s certainly a horrible trainwreck, but where Guilty Crown or Blood-C were punctuated by a number of explosions in odd places, keeping the audience continually wondering what happens next, this has just been the shrill grind of metal on metal, damaging the ears.

Tortured analogy aside, things do happen in the show, and that does put it at least a little ways above the pack. However, they rarely make sense and are more often than not simply reasons to get melodramatic again over the evil of war. That chestnut has been run into the ground. The biggest problem is that I hate pretty much every single one of the characters. They’re immature, stupid, oblivious, whining, melodramatic morons, and this is presented within the context of the show as a good thing. There’s been more than enough opportunities to disabuse them of this and make the little dumbasses grow up, but each one goes wiped away and then forgotten only for them to rehash it an episode later.

So, yeah. There’s not a decent chance I’m not going to be following this when it picks back up in the fall after I’ve had a season to let the bile forment. It takes spectacle and through tired repetition and incomprehensible developments, succeeds at turning it dull. You can only point at it and shake your head for so long. Who knows though? Maybe there’ll be only even worse things on. Again.