天下制覇

   

Stay tuned for next week when maybe, we won’t be trying to make something that sucks on purpose.

Oops. I hadn’t noticed this had gotten an additional broadcast on AT-X well before I go to work or I’d have covered it in the morning. Oh well. Also, Chaos Dragon finally got an OP.

Impressions:

As I mentioned in the season preview, about a fifteen second glance at the source this is based on showed that its gimmick was to be a really insipid and generic school girls club thing, but at the end of each scene, go “EVERYONE’S DEAD AND ZOMBIES.” For the adaptation, the big change was to wait until the end of the episode to go “EVERYONE’S DEAD AND ZOMBIES.” The previous scenes were just replaced by shots of girls melancholically staring into the distance. The level of thought that goes into adapting Japanese media, boys and girls. And therein lies our problem, because it seemingly is content to just make a totally insipid, generic school girls club thing with the tagline at the end of “but it’s really not!” Yeah, I’ve heard that song and dance before, most often from magical girl and mecha shows where the shocking twist is that it just looks cliche, but the magical dream wish granter is a monkey’s paw and/or something is eating your soul. And it’s not even like the “I thought everything was normal, but it was ruined and/or I was talking to Mr. Skeleton all along!” is especially unique either. I think that’s at least fifty seven of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

It would be one thing if we were seeing an obviously distorted view of reality from a girl fighting to stay in control, and while that may be the direction this will be taking in the future (mostly because it’s the blindingly obvious way to go), this episode sure as hell didn’t have any kind of undercurrent of psychological damage until the last couple minutes. Well, I mean, no more so than any of the other nineteen billion girl club affairs, because there’s a good argument that pretty much all of the characters in all of them are obsessive psychopaths with severe societal disorders and crippling abandonment issues. I mean, I still applaud this one for giving something that will at the end of it no doubt test the power of friendship with something a little greater than someone moving away and forgetting e-mail, phones, and cars exist, or getting a boo boo on their feelings, but from this episode, I don’t really know that I have it in me to stick it out that far. It did such a fine imitation of bog standard dreck for twenty minutes that by the time the reveal finally came, I wanted them all to be torn apart by velociraptors to put an end to my suffering.

At least it has the most animated and expressive visuals of the visuals of all the drecky shows this season that it’s imitating though, even if faces and mouths sort of got a little… blobby at times. I guess that’s something it can wear on its sleeve.

Next Episode:

Das wiederholung.