The Price of a Smile #02 — Oh No! A Small Jagged Piece of Rock!

January 11th, 2019

 

Why is the battlefield so unscorched and free of debris?

Impressions:

This really should've been the first episode. Like Boogiepop, a significantly better showing than last week, but also introducing a few new ones, the most significant of which was the milked-as-hell death scene ending with an absolutely ear-piercing scream. Less is more, guys. It's a little silly to begin with that apparently there has been a full fledged all-out long-running war that they're apparently losing badly and somehow this is kept from the princess, yet every single one of them venerates this child as nothing short of a god walking among them. Imagine if instead they were focused on how everything is falling apart outside her bubble and even showed a little contempt for having to put on the show, or that she's a tool for the military complex, rather than it being their divine honor that they get to do so. Or every single damn one of them trembling in barely restrained grief when her illusion is disrupted in any way at all. Makes it hard to think that there is an illusion there at all.

Instead, they go off to war, stomp the enemy with rookies, brag about how all their shiny new tech without a single scratch mark on any of it is the best there ever was as they fight a weirdly sterile battle where mechs get smacked or shot and then just drop into the completely empty wasteland they decided to have it out in. I'm not even sure anybody died in that opening fight. Hell, I'm not even sure more than a daycare's worth of people were participating in it on either side. It's a random piece of shrapnel that does the little twink in so the narrative can totally switch to I guess a particularly happy-go-lucky soldier girl? The bubble extends waaaaaay the hell out past the pedestal they have the princess on and makes the expository claims of doom and gloom hard to swallow.

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