天下制覇

Everything’s better with dog anuses.

Impressions:

I think this show’s trying a little too hard to stick to the ‘date’ part of the title. I’m really not certain what purpose the dates between Touka and Origami were supposed to serve that couldn’t have been better served by them simply not existing. I mean as far as plot or character development go, not wasting time. Their purpose as far as that goes was obvious. If the goal is some kind of them-getting-angsty-over-perceived-betrayal angle (or god forbid, some growth by not getting bitchy and growing up to a maturity level above petulant three year olds), then they didn’t need any of that, or it’d be served better by him standing them up because he was being dragged around by a psychopath. They weren’t really using it for humor either. Just a vehicle for a montage of a date between all three and yet another insert song, this time with extra autotune. But hey, there were dog anuses pressed up against the camera at one point, so we can’t call it a total loss.

The turning point of the episode, four minutes frm the end and where it decided to actually bother getting to the bloodshed that I so crave, was when we came upon a group of masked thugs shooting BBs at the ground around a cat. Maybe they were trying to shoot the cat and were just horrible shots, but it did successfully combine the kind of comical over the top antagonist with utterly ineffective villainry that is completely impossible to take seriously, kind of like Lex Luthor’s 1950s plan to flood the Earth in order to steal all the fruit pies. That was further not helped by the censorship again. Like anything meant to evoke a visceral response, especially fear or terror, subtlety is a great way to go. Our imaginations are worse than anything you can spit out, Japan. Let our brains scare us. Give the sickening sound of bones crunching or blood splatter, don’t show it like someone took the photoshop tool to a silhouette. Granted, they were probably trying for more jarring than scary, what with the blaring sirens and screaming, but I haven’t the faintest idea why they would for something we saw just one episode ago. It’s not going to be surprising a second time. Maybe if you hadn’t done the first one. Plus, I don’t even know what it is I’m supposed to be seeing here or what was censored. I think it’s half a bloody shoe. Either way, between the Dastardly Cat Torturing Squad, ineffectual attempts to be frightening using the same thing already seen before but now with more sirens and censored shoes, and then immediately beating up the bad guy to remove the cliffhanger from the end of the episode, that wasn’t a high point.

Next Episode:

Fighting the psycho, finally.