Valvrave #12 — And Now There Are Space Wizards

June 27th, 2013

 

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.

Posted in Valvrave | 19 Comments »

19 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Burnout says:

    No, no, those aren’t stamps: They’re irons.

    The robots are called Waffes, so they’re attacking them with…

    WAFFLE IRONS

  • Niky says:

    Oh God-_-
    I absolutely agree with you. Especially about this:

    ‘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.’

    The characters are the worst…

  • Chevalier says:

    “The action is well animated, but becomes token and boring through stalely rehashing the same cycle every episode.”

    Really? I would’t rely on you to pay attention to the details of the action sequences or find anything interesting in them, but come one dude…complaining about the same “cycle” in a mecha show? That comes with the territory.

    “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.”

    You’d be wrong about that last part too, but I’ll give you that sympathy is a subjective element.

    “The main gimmicks of the plot go almost completely unused, or when they are, they rarely make sense either.”

    You seem to have a problem both accepting that the gimmicks are inherently unrealistic and that the show has been keeping things relatively vampire-free for a very obvious reason.

    “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.”

    You seem to have neither seen Blood-C in recent memory or have hilarious double standards with regards to Guilty Crown.

    “The biggest problem is that I hate pretty much every single one of the characters.”

    That’s your problem, I’d say, but thankfully not mine.

    “They’re immature, stupid, oblivious, whining, melodramatic morons, and this is presented within the context of the show as a good thing.”

    Only if you totally misread both them and the show. Which you always do, so congratulations!

    • UltimaLuminaire says:

      You should check out his other reviews. It’s weird. I swear he’s got some kind of guilty pleasure button, but I simply can’t figure out exactly what it/they might be. I mean, he’s pretty fickle about fan-service animu, so when he sticks with one it sorta just throws you off. But man, I can’t imagine how anyone, especially someone like you who types to call out double standards, could like any of the characters in this show. There’s so much messy dialogue and transitions that you’d literally have to be filling in the holes yourself and making up story elements just to suspend disbelief (or to resist strangling the writer). I can’t see this show as better than the atrocious Blood-C, but it was so bad that I can almost believe it made me laugh despite it all. That’s about the only pleasure I’ll get from this show. Just what did you see in Valvrave? What is it that makes you forgive so much? Was it the blatant references to Gundam Seed? Was it the fan service? The close-ups of bishounen high schoolers? Baffling.

  • Burnout says:

    This show is the dumbest shit.

    • Chipp12 says:

      Also Aoi Yuki’s voice acting made me believe that if she voiced some dog it would’ve been the best role in her career.

  • animefan~ says:

    we all have our own opinions, to me I thought the show was pretty good :)

    • algorithm says:

      That’s some pretty low standards here.

      • animefan~ says:

        Nope not low standards at all~ sure there are parts of the anime that had me a bit confused. But for me I thought it was not the worst anime I’ve seen. And once again we all like different types of anime so if I like one anime doesn’t mean another person will and vice versa. ^^

      • Kunagisa says:

        I don’t even watch this anymore but if you have any sort of standard you wouldn’t even be here, so don’t even try to pretend your taste is superior (or you even have any sort of taste).

  • Fate says:

    I can’t decide if I like or hate this show. It certainly has pacing problems though. Spends too much time on pointless BS. The villains are also not scary and are mostly pretty pathetic, space magician guy aside. It just didn’t feel like it was going anywhere for so many episodes.

  • Anonymous says:

    Not only are the space wizards, they’re space wizard ILLUMINATI. This show has it all.

  • Anonymous says:

    I think he said in his season review of Samurai Bride that he hated it.