Ms. Vampire in the Neighborhood #01 — The Unoriginals

October 5th, 2018

 

Was there even a diary in the Vampire Diaries?

I had this as a Saturday show in the preview. AT-X made a fool of me. Curse you, AT-X. Short break after this in today's marathon anime run. When we return, sumo, Index, and even more lesbians.

Impressions:

And here we have a more unabashed lesbian-focused affair, merely the second of three for the day until Senran Kagura adds a fourth next week, but it's about as adept at comedy as the previous show was at drama. Weirdly, it has a pretty similar OST though, all soothing, romantic, inoffensive music, the auditory version of being dosed to the gills on sedatives while middle aged Japanese women trying to sound like teenagers chirp for attention like needy baby birds. 

Anyway, "I'm a vampire, not anybody suspicious." "That is suspicious." That's what passes for a joke around these parts. And don't expect any kind of even episodic story to drive things either. The closest thing this had in terms of that was the obnoxious one wanted to live with the vampire, so she puttered around the house getting underfoot… which is what she was doing to start with. It's insubstantial. It's white noise. It's vapid nothingness that fills twenty minutes, probably best taken with alcohol or sedatives.

Posted in Ms. Vampire | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • anise_punter says:
    October 5, 2018 at 10:31 am

    I mention this every season but would it kill one of these shows to start with everybody introduced to maximize the amount of character interactions right at the start and work back from there every so often?

    That said, you can pretty much inject this show right into my veins, as the saying goes.

    • Aroduc says:
      October 5, 2018 at 11:10 am

      I think often back to shows like Place to Place or GJ Club, which I consider about the baseline for stomachable. Things like GA Art Design are easy. Energy, education, and a real passion for the subject rather than using it as an excuse for “girls in a club.” The others… I haven’t come up with a good answer for, but I think it’s characters and chemistry, of which shows like this have virtually none. They try to be cute and funny, but it’s entirely characters talking past each other, not actually interacting, and that both bores and irritates me. Manzai is dumb and I want it to go away forever.

      • anise_punter says:
        October 5, 2018 at 11:22 am

        Yeah I suppose if you’re not big on manzai you would have tired of these shows in like… 2011? 2012? At some point I just tired of the mean-spirited snark used in place of comedy in most of our western shows.

        I’d prefer old-style anime slapstick, to be sure, but I feel like the current generation of writers has no idea how to do that so you get things like Love Tyrant which was atrocious, or Jashin which should have run with the black comedy sociopathy but instead turned into a low-quality slice of life instead. We weren’t watching it for that!