天下制覇

Oh good. Blood.

Impressions:

I almost kind of liked the structure of this episode although it doesn’t flow well from the previous ones at all. It kind of reminded me of the 90s DCAU stuff in its vignette of a regular person having a bad day and then instead of dealing with it like a normal person, putting on tights and running around the city declaring themselves the Pugilistic Painter. Except in this case, it was just straight up murdering the ones who ‘wronged’ them, which continues to create the problem it’s had from the start. Again, I really can’t shake the feeling that they’re trying to make us feel bad for these insecure people that jump straight to murder when given the slightest opportunity, especially since the show couldn’t seem to care less about the people who were murdered (or attempted murdered). There’s a number of things they could be doing to better show that it’s the evil corrupting them in some way, but they’re not, so we have terrible people doing terrible things, becoming literal monsters over it, and then the protagonists whinging on about whether they should be killing mass-murdering monsters or not. Killing’s just too serious a thing to skate by on "I lost control and didn’t really mean it. Pity me." You can’t have your cake and eat it too, show.

That does also mean that this episode didn’t have a whole lot of progress on the other fronts. They revealed the antagonist (well, antagonists) who giving evil tarot readings on the street. That one I find a lot more interesting than tinkly piano business man. Thankfully, it did mean a lot less of the infodump too, so I’m willing to give it a pass for now. They’re doing a good job keeping up the budget too. Nowhere near Symphogear’s levels, but certainly well beyond what most ‘action’ shows typically manage.