天下制覇

I wish I had slept through this too.

Impressions:

To quote Skwisgaar, this episode was dildos. My expectations for this show are pretty low at the moment, but "Tertiary character vs generic Kugimiya Rie lolicon fetish character in a popularity contest" was nearly last on the list of things I would have liked to see from it. Even Ryoko was bored by the entire episode, although it may be hard to tell because she only had about 6 lines. It was like playing Where’s Waldo, complete with the g. The coup de grace, as it were, was JC Staff having the characters cosplay Zero no Tsukaima characters. All I can do is keep telling myself that it could have been worse. They could have had a montage of all of JC Staff’s ‘greatest’ hits.

So, for the second time today (weirdly enough), we have a show that completely throws away just about every part of the first two episodes to go off in some random hackneyed romantic direction. At least this one sort of introduced its characters before this episode. Furthermore, the narrator only had about 10 lines this week. That was a blessing in disguise. She still got in the way, and I must still point out that she had more than either Ryoko or Ryoushi. That is an issue. A significant issue. The main characters were present the entire show, just never actually involved with anything. Kind of like Otohime was before this episode and she’s going to be again for the remainder of the show.

The only thing that this had to do with the Tortoise and Hare fable was the naming pun for Usami to rabbit and Otohime’s old hairstyle/nickname.