天下制覇

How deviant.

Impressions:

Well, let’s start with the bad. The production of this episode was a massive plummet from the first. A buttload of panned out still shots, lots of backs of people’s heads as they talked, and the entire imagined fight sequence was done in fuzzy-vision^tm. Shaft’s influence on this also went from noticeable to all the subtlety of a mack truck. Not that this is completely a bad thing, since we’re still in the nascent stages where all they really like to do are the soft palette shots, a text ticker on the bottom of the screen for jokes in an otherwise lame scene, or the strange blob of people that they loved to use in PPD and Negima!?, but my faith in Shaft hasn’t been terribly high lately. Hopefully they Shinbo will keep his grubby claws off of this and it’ll stay pretty subdued. Don’t get me wrong, it was still a pretty fun episode, but it’s a little disconcerting to see such a huge drop in the production immediately.

The episode itself was mostly focused on a lot of lesbian jokes, but the punchline to the whole thing was pretty much given away by the opening sequence, so that sort of dulled the impact. I kind of wish Yoshii had made it to the end of the episode with the table still glued to his hand too. At least Hideyoshi and Kouta are already pointing out how stupid he is about the girls liking him. And with one character already apparently in a relationship, and most of the cast aware of the other, I guess that leaves Hideyoshi and Kouta to hook up. Now that’s drama. Or you can just keep telling yourself that it’s his sister and not him. Sliver Link Shaft is certainly milking the hell out of Hideyoshi for all they’re worth.

Very Brief Summary:

Class A wants ‘someone’ from Class F, and everybody assumes it’s Himeji for forbidden love reasons. Some hijinks between Kitehead and her own lesbian stalker on the roof (nice Figure Four leglock, by the way) and Yoshii walks in on Himeji writing what he thinks is a love letter and gets all bummed out. Then comes the showdown, which was a pretty subdued fight punctuated by Hideyoshi in all sorts of revealing attire as the ring-girl as well as Himeji’s imagined overblow showdown. It comes down to Yuuji and his woman, and he ends up losing the pop quiz challenge so gets dragged off to be the bitch in the relationship.