天下制覇

…And a skunk

Just for the record, I watched Softenni’s second DVD special, but I’m not going to cover it because it was 95% the same shots from the first one, and otherwise just Kotone being her usual lame self.

Impressions:

As this Ringo crap drags on, my interest is really started to trail off. This episode absolutely reeked of blatant space and time-filling, from the random skunk going around gassing people to all the fairy tale crap. A healthy chunk of this episode took place in cardboard cutout daydreams about the various characters being trapped in musical fairy tales too, which isn’t helping assuage my complaints about how the last couple episodes have dragged and gone nowhere compared to the first. Ringo’s daydreams are just too… well… stupid and childish to be able to seriously match against her being a stalker, so it’s really not clear what they’re trying to do with her besides fill episodes. The only intriguing part of the episode was the random murder (?) in the last 5 seconds.

It doesn’t necessarily need to go back to the darker themes of episode 1 to be interesting again, but it needs to do something. When you’ve got one character saying "THE PLOT OF THE SHOW IS TO GET THIS WIDGET, GO DO IT" and all the character putz around imagining themselves as Snow White or thinking about how curry is the greatest thing ever, it detracts from the weight of any plot elements. What I wanted to see was more on the relationships between the Himari and the brothers, more about the Penguin Overlord, and more about what’s going on in general. Instead, it’s been three episodes of putzing around, mediocre slapstick, and things most likely done because they were also in Utena and lord knows there’s a fanbase to pander to.