天下制覇

If I wasn’t sure Asuna was bisexual before, I am sure now.

By the by, just FYI and not that I care overly much (nor should you), but Aria TSA’s off this week and will air its final two episodes (11 and 12) back to back next Thursday at its usual time.
Belated Edit:
I have a meeting and other things to attend in not too long that’ll keep me busy until the evening. Since Enma hasn’t shown up yet in the interwebs, it’ll have to wait until probably fairly late tonight.

Impressions:

Bleh. The crappy flashback continued to the very end and went nowhere interesting. Kotone learned a valuable lesson that she can let someone else have her back when she fails and… that’s really it. I wish I knew why comedies seem so intent on ruining what made them interesting in the first place by whitewashing everything with sad music, crying, and pithy messages about friendship. Maybe then I could figure out a way to stop it forever. Some kind of weasel-mounted bomb perhaps.

At any rate, it’s a shame that it took the entire rest of this episode and ten minutes of the previous one to get to an uninteresting and foregone conclusion… in the past… involving only two of the characters in the show. The weakest two of the core bunch. Sigh… At least Hanako made an appearance. I couldn’t tell you what she was doing in some random classroom in the background, but it was probably nefarious. It was just rubbing salt in their wound to show Kotone’s electrified delusion after the ending credits of a hellscape with Chitose ruling as its overlord.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Ending episodes aside, this ended up being a fun show overall with the occasional glimpses into how it could have been so much better. It never capitalized on the strengths of its best jokes and instead kept getting bogged down in romantic melodrama. When you have Chitose going feral, Kurusu popping up out of nowhere to harass people or her, and Lizzy screwing around with her in the background, anything involving Kotone’s throbbing ovaries is just tedium in comparison. As much as I do like Misshi himself as a character, removal of all the whiny romantic stuff between him and Kotone would have done nothing but improve the show.

Otherwise, there’s not a lot to say. It was a fairly substanceless show by design and overall, it stuck to that. Most of the rest of its production was solid if somewhat unremarkable. Animation and art were decent from start to finish, it had a solid core cast (although I wouldn’t say the same for any of the tertiary cast besides Misaki), and… again, aside from the last couple episodes, stayed mostly on target with the comedy throughout. It’s a good comedy that unfortunately never took the last few steps it needed to be a great one.