天下制覇

Walking into a wake and then screaming at the top of your lungs is apparently not strange in the slightest.

Impressions:

I really must thank this show for putting things in perspective. I like to rag on clueless idiots in corny romantic comedies for being completely oblivious, but the cast of this show knocks them out of the ballpark. The first half of this episode was the priest wandering around, learning about the people before they died. He immediately figures out that they all suddenly quit their jobs for no reason. Then he finds someone who just quit his job for no reason. He proceeds to go home and think about it for literally days. Hmmm… everybody who dies quits their job… this guy quit his job… hmmmmmm… What could this mean? I can’t wait for him to discover to his surprise next week that the guy is roaming the streets, eating effeminate goth kids dead.

Then Tohru ‘suddenly’ drops dead, so we get a brief bit about Natsuno having no idea how to cope with his death which was handled decently enough, but for the other 8 minutes of the second half, Masao was shrieking and screaming in the middle of the funeral, taunting his family for his step-brother being sick, and trying to engage in fist fights over who the saddest person was. "Ha ha, he’s dying… Sucks for him! What!? Why are you mad at me?! Waaaaah!" Then, when a zombie/vampire falls out of a tree on top of him, his reaction was "Huh? Do I know you?" Not "Holy crap! Guy jumping out of tree on top of me!" But a calm, collected reminder that this is the person who just quit his job from earlier in the episode… which… strangely, was kind of required since there’s no way in hell we were supposed to be able to know that.

Everything that the show did right at the end of last week with setting the mood, it completely putzed up this week. Natsuno struggling was about the only part of the episode with any merit derived from anything other than mocking it, and he still remains an immature self-centered jerk. At least Masao’s probably dead now, or at the very least, if Shimizu is any indication, transformation into an antagonist will actually make the character passable… if not for the blithering totally undeveloped imbeciles comprising Team Protagonist. I guess I’ll stick with this for the remainder of the season based on sheer inertia and the fact that it is quite amusing to mock the stupidity of imbeciles, but unless next season’s Thursdays are very weak, I don’t know if I’ll have the will to reach the end of this one.

And yes, I already know about the further licking of strange body parts in Amagami.