天下制覇

Set dicktitude to 11.

I got roped into some early morning stuff over the weekend that'll keep me busy until the early afternoon. It may be a little bit tomorrow and Sunday before I can get to any/every thing(s).

Impressions:

First off, this was a double length episode, and let me tell you, I did not have the patience for that, although by the same token, looking over the caps and seeing the great variety in the scenes should give you an idea of the pace and budget of this show. For the most part, it's a soap opera. Everybody has daddy issues, and the father figure in this case is a gigantic dickweed that everyone adores anyway. There's also a massive cultural disconnect here for me since I can't even fathom this kind of thing, which is probably also why the end whatever of "Do your own stuff" falls so flat, since that or other varieties of "write/perform what you know" is the core tenant of western stuff, not "blindly emulate what came before." Anyway, the first half/twenty minutes was just boring overly dramatic stuff filled with your usual boring Japanese melodrama. Perhaps a bit more book throwing than usual and disappointing your father figure than usual, but only because there were multiple people and the father figure was especially dickish. It wasn't until the second half that it got sucked into the rakugo dimension and ground to a full stop.

They spent goddamned ten minutes on the guy's routine. Buddha H Jesus, Japan. At any point did someone stop and wonder to themselves how long it takes for a point to be made and that it's time to move the goddamned hell on? Show don't tell is great, but at the core of that concept is "does this add anything?" The point was made, and overdone if anything about thirty seconds into that scene, and yet it just kept going and going and going. If it's not important and it's not entertaining, then… what? And this is after already having skipped over the previous two rakugo bits, and with yet more to come. It's not even like it was either great or catastrophic either, although from my American cultural standpoint, I generally expect comedy routines to have a joke or two. The closest it seemed to come were things like "You seem poor and have no shoes. Were they stolen?" "Uhhhh, yes! And they were ridiculous great shoes." -raucous laughter-

Next Episode:

Daddy still hates you.