天下制覇

Yes, yes, get it out of your system.

Impressions:

There is a fundamental problem with the entire presentation of Shiori’s character that is already making this arc annoy me. Her deal is that she’s supposed to be too shy to say what she’s thinking, except from the audience’s perspective, 75% of this episode is her talking to them. Not in any confused or jumbled manner either. That would be an intelligent way to handle things. Just a normal, slow paced constant narration, resulting in long pans over bookshelves, the floor, people’s feet… the usual high points of any longwinded narration. It also results in these bizarre scenes where Shiori and Keima or LC literally stand there, staring at each other for minutes at a time as she slowly holds a conversation in her head. It is beyond artificial, but instead of trying to play it off for a gag, they’re just ignoring it.

At least there wasn’t an insert song and montage this week. I’m not saying that watching Shiori shelve books multiple times while she talks about how books are god is an improvement, but it was a respite of sorts nonetheless. It could also help if Shiori’s general archetype wasn’t so beaten to death at this point that it’s more hamburger than human. I guess LC finally discovering firetrucks is the highlight of the episode then. I’d rather watch her firetruck adventures than minutes upon minutes of Shiori staring at people.