天下制覇

The joke is that she masturbated.

If you’re interested, Kingdom‘s first episode is out. However, although it can be difficult to tell from screencaps (and being Jump, Pierrot, and a month before the new season, I’ve yet to pay attention to promo materials), the whole thing is done in what appears to be really creepy cel shaded CG making it an exercise in how far into the uncanny valley you are willing to tread. Which is especially creepy because apparently they haven’t gotten far enough to be able to animate hair with it, so you’ve got these two kids with giant pointy hair extrusions all over the place which appear to be made of steel for how much of an effect physics has on them. Thanks, but no thanks.

Impressions:

And the show continues is descent into the mundane. The first half was just utterly bland, and featured such hilarious segments as… they go shopping… and… they find whose-her-face performing as a mall actor… and they do another bad dream/game parody in case you hadn’t gotten your fill of them last week. I think the ‘highlight’ of how bad it got was when they explained the double standard joke with the glasses, in English. Thanks. Almost missed that. But you were there to make sure that I once again caught the same joke you’ve been using at least once an episode for the last month and a half. What I wouldn’t give for them to have just a single crowbar to the groin these days instead of the same tired romantic comedy cliches they had worn out well over a month ago.

I guess the second half improved a little bit with the body-swap thing, but I’m not willing to call it any more than a blip. It still wasn’t particularly funny and about the only even vaguely amusing thing they actually did with it was Nyarlko-as-Mahiro wandering into the bathroom and then coming out sparkling and fascinated by being a man. Besides that though, little else of any note, and apparently they deemed this such an important occurance in the show that it needed to be stretched across two episodes with the cliffhanger of Nyarlko-as-Mahiro telling the class he loved her. Great.

Preview:

At least do an all-out swapfest.