Valvrave #24 — Missed Opportunities
December 26th, 2013
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At least they didn’t even try.
Forgot to mention it last week, but KLK is off this week and next, and will be returning on January 9th.
Impressions:
They missed a big one this week to make things really really homosexual. Come on, Elfy, all we needed was a “I need you inside me, right now” line and that would have… well, not salvaged anything, but would have at lesat done something to an utterly boring first two thirds. Everything basically just devolves into a meaningless punch-up. Who cares who wins? They’re already attempting to executie the immortal space vampires in the streets, forming pitchfork bearing mobs, and have turned on space nazi druid leaders, so… what happens if he loses at space punchies again? He doesn’t get revenge for… uh… I guess we’re just ignoring the body swapping/possession thing too.
Anyway, Haruto in Elf fight, uses up all his memories leaving him with slightly more of a personality than before, Elfy calls him a friend, then he dies. I guess dying without all his memories is supposed to be more tragic than dying with them? The goal is maximum angst, right? Gotta wring this out! But that’s okay, there’s a statue of him that they stand in front of for diplomatic meetings with aliens or something. World saved anyway. Aside from, you know, the paranoid torch-bearing mobs that are now roaming the streets calling for the death of all monsters.Â
Final Thoughts:
I glanced back at my comments on the end of the first season and had to chuckle about my remarks on them constantly forgetting every moral lesson they learned so they could rehash it over and over and over again. And this season was little different. Those weren’t even the things the ass-pull of a plot device said they were supposed to be forgetting either.
They jettisoned a lot of the truly moronic stuff from the first season, like the love triangle, rape, twitter, and “school spirit yay!” but they didn’t actually bring anything in to replace it either. Which isn’t to say that the show got any less stupid. I could not for the life of me tell you what they were doing on the planet they spent most of the show on, robots that eat brains only when the plot says so and even then only the parts of the brain for maximum emo, simply forgetting Saki for most of the show including just leaving her behind without any awareness of it whatsoever, or how absurd the escalation was from “they’re immortal monsters… KILL EVERYTHING JOIN THE NAZIS!” or even just “they’re immortals, now let’s start killing them off… but STILL IMMORTALS, GUYS!”
So what we end up with is a basically flattened and dragged out version of the first season. The lows maybe weren’t as low, but I don’t think it was really any the better for it since everything else got really stretched out and that removed a lot of what made it really stand out; horrible writing not exactly being unique among the world of Japanese media, just horrible writing that barrels ahead without pause. It still went through the same wash-rinse-repeat cycle every three to four episodes of Haruto (and sometimes buddies) losing their resolve to fight for an episode before regaining it, the plot continued to make absolutely no sense whatsoever, and they all acted like complete ninnies instead of anything approaching an actual human to empathize with.
I guess I’d call this season weaker then as it’s not quite the same completely nonsensical trainwreck as the first. Still a complete mess of unlikeable characters, repeated episodes, and complete nonsense for a plot, mind you, just a lot more mired in a futile attempt to turn it into a more serious and/or melodramatic show which pulled everything away from the characters besides angst-time, which were the chunky mayonnaise that used to tie the crapwich together.
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These split cour shows keep having second halfs that do not live up to the first.