天下制覇

Wow, JCStaff… wow.

Impressions:

JCstaff is simply doing an amazing job with this. Between the imagery of Asuna as a broken doll in a few shots, to her looking like an absolutely feral whenever she pulled out the knife, and my favorite shot of her craziness… her stabbing the ground over and over and over again thinking about Shota and her father really drove home how messed up in the head she was after being sexually exploited by her deadbeat father. Her death at the end felt a little forced since the other cop appeared out of basically nowhere and she was just attacking some canvas, but that’s really my only major complaint with this episode aside from the Ali Project OP.

Man, am I tired of Ali Project. Write a new song, you talentless hacks!

Well, and I hate that stupid staff still. At least Fumika is all sorts of awesome. Watching her holster her pistol in her handbag like a champ made me cheer for her a bit. The girl’s got moves and apparently she can fight switchblade wielding maniacs with little issue too. I imagine that her past will be fleshed out a bit more as the series progresses. I’m also pretty sure that most of the arcs will not be this kind of insanity, but watching the shigofumi bounce around from sender to sender was pretty cool too.

Anyway, I’m still not sure what’s going on with Saturdays. Kimiaru, Kimikiss, Shigofumi, and Zetsubou are way too much, but they’re all so good right now. Curse you, Saturdays! Curse you!

Quick summary:

• Asuna attacks Fumika, but she escapes.
• Fumika has a vision of when she was human with a pistol.
• Asuna flashes back to just before she killed her father… he was forcing her to pose nude while men took lewd photographs. He didn’t care about her at all and was going to use her sister to earn money like this as well, so she attacked him.
• When police started investigating Shota missing, she decided to abandon her sister, cut her hair, and run away.
• Fumika presents a shigofumi to Asuna, but Asuna attacks her with the switchblade. Fumika knocks her down and holds her at gunpoint before forcing her to accept Shota’s letter to her.
• Asuna runs off the train with the letter clutched angrily in her hand.
• The cops search for her, having figured out that she’s central to it.
• Asuna loses her mind more and more as Shota narrates the letter he wrote to her. She runs to his rocket lab area thinking about how she built a different life full of lies of what could have been to show to Shota.
• She makes it to the rooftop and finds the rocket ready to launch. She goes through Shota’s final checklist as the police make their way through his lab.
• Asuna starts the countdown as the police walk onto the roof. She glares, but he tries to talk to her like a friend.
• The wind blows and a canvas covers the rocket. She rushes angrily with her switchblade out and slashes away the canvas… and then falls as one of the cops shoots her down in fear.
• The rocket ignites and lifts off.
• Her sister watches it rise to the heavens.
• Fumika delivers Asuna’s shigofumi to her sister.

Shigofumi OP

Preview:

 On to arc #2! More school shenanigans.