天下制覇

As if Mitsuba wasn’t unpleasant enough to begin with.

Impressions:

Ugh. Chiaki Omigawa remains as talentless as ever. How does she keep getting work? Learn to emote, damn it. Volume is not the same as feeling. Even notwithstanding Omigawa’s godawful performance as judo-girl Mitsuba, this was a big step down from the first episode too. I’m not surprised about that at all given that it’s GoHands, but all that prettiness and visual energy from the first episode was completely gone, and when this show loses about 95% of its drive, it drags… badly. It wasn’t just the animation either. The jazzy fun tracks from the first episode were almost completely absent, with long periods of nothing but empty silence in the background. Come on, GoHands. You know how to do this. Set the mood. Create atmosphere. Don’t just toss up some stock shots with a different background and nip off down to the red light district to do body shots off of Jamaican male bodybuilders.

The only other real thing of note about this episode was introducing the council’s attached teacher, Naruko, who is basically just an older and more sexually frustrated version of Shino, which was already pretty plainly obvious from the OP. There were still a few good jokes here and there, but most of them were at the start about the totally non-sexual sport of half-naked people wrestling. When Aria and Shino try to be underfoot and snarky, the comedy works decently despite the other failings. The rest of the cast though… well… here’s to hoping the other side characters pick up the slack.

Preview:

Hot spring trip already? Man…