天下制覇

Things were more meaningful in the past, after all.

Impressions:

At least it didn’t surprise me by doing anything good with the ending. Hell, Rikka wasn’t even bloody involved with it really. Wet Blanket came to the realization thanks to all his friends about her and went leaping off on his bike over hills against the backdrop of city lights and flashbacks. And oh, the flashbacks. So many flashbacks. Then he declared himself to be the Dark Flame Master and they rode off, hugged with a solar flare in the background and screen spinning, and went out to look over the ocean. There wasn’t even any catharsis for her. Anything really. She just had a bunch of flashbacks and then decided to stop being sad because Yuuta showed up and said "stop being sad." The end. Fantastic.

Final Thoughts:

This really had the same problem from start to finish; it was heavy handed as hell. Of course, it took a journey from attempted to be a cutesy comedy to romance to melodrama, slowly excising anything and everything that could even be construed as vaguely fun as the weeks went on. Not that I’d say the early parts were all that fun either, what with the director standing with his bullhorn just off screen screaming "DO YOU FIND THIS CUTE!? IS THIS CUTE ENOUGH FOR YOU!? CUUUUUUUUUUUTE!" but at least it had some flashy action sequences to make up for it. Not enough to make up for the wet blanket of a protagonist complaining about them, but if you closed your eyes and blocked him out, you could at least enjoy the flash and style.

Of course, vacuous flash and style blasted in your face have a very different standard for appeal than wailing violins and melodrama. The characters were nowhere near developed enough for how heavy it tried to be (or rather, were developed as joke for half the series instead) nor did anything important enough happen to justify literally an entire third of the show dedicated to just flat out being sad because being sad means the characters are… complex or something? The only things it was missing was someone standing in the rain and looking out over a lake meaningfully oh wait, they got that last one in the final episode. And when the writers realized that they didn’t have the characters to support this, they just went to the laziest standbys possible; rewriting half and making the other half cry.

I can take bad. Enjoy it even. What I cannot stand is something trying to be emotionally manipulating and doing it with the grace and subtlety of a three-legged hippopotamus on rollerblades. It was tolerable when it was just trying to be silly and had the slickest action sequences this season as random interstitials. Sadly, that dried up about halfway through for a director with a fistful of sad piano music in one hand and by the deftness that he used it, I’m guess a rusty hook for the other.