天下制覇

  

Oh, excuse me. A symbol for a vagina.

Impressions:

Guys, guys, guys. Bear with me here. I think the white flowers might just be symbols of his innocence and purity. That is so crazy and has never ever been done before ever! It’s as deep as the masks! Christ. The first half was like watching a maxipad commercial filled with plaintive screams and spilling fluid. Okay, so exactly like a ten minute maxipad commercial. Oh, and the flashbacks. Because holy bloody hell, we can never have enough goddamned flashbacks. The thing that last week’s episode ended on, him ‘breaking’ because some random people died and hs hair turning white, didn’t happen until nineteen minutes into the episode, leaving an unconvincing few minutes of fight set to the OP for it to crap out on the 20+ minutes of torture over the last two episodes.

I think the funniest part of this episode was how the entire cast and everything that was going on last week just never showed up at all. I guess everything was just sorted out and taken care of. Go team! You really… showed up last week? Then again, his “my angst is so much more than anything you can do” schlock was pretty laughable too. All that angst that was basically retconned in just to make this a supposedly climactic fight. No cigar, boys. Not even close.

Final Thoughts:

Astonishingly for a Pierrot show, the production wasn’t the biggest mostly solid. It wasn’t particularly good during the non-action parts, but effort was well allocated for the parts that needed a bit more pizazz. The action was still mostly fast paced and had a solid budget behind it steering clear of some of the worst abuses of cheap tricks certain other shows wallowed in. It wasn’t excellent though. The direction has an unfortunate habit of getting distracted with long monologues and especially flashbacks. The attempts at being visceral and creepy were also rather haphazard, more often than not coming across as silly since they were so over the top, including one bizarre fight where they introduced power levels for god only knows what reason only to immediately forget them again. There was, however a big problem with consistency. Vivisection would be walked off while a punch to the face was treated as a deadly blow. And everything was too over the top to be really visceral in the moment too.

Which leads well into what the show lacked more than anything else, weight. Weight on the characters. Weight on the plot. The most ambitious thing it seemed to bring to the table on any front was “Killing is bad.” A sentiment that reduced the main character to a sniveling wreck in the first episode and it never grew beyond. He was the worst abuser, being a sponge that just sat there and soaked up abuse for about 98% of the show while either staring placidly, staring in shock, or bemoaning his fate, but it was true for really the entire cast. They tried to hand-wave it occasionally, with silly clowns who think he smells special, or hauling out friendship for the inanimate sponge in the final arc, but even if we assume “manifest protagonist” is a driving plot element, there’s nothing else going on. The answer to “What would happen if they were defeated and the protagonist died?” is simply “Then he wouldn’t be a character in the show anymore,” and it’s hard to see how that would have changed anything. It probably would have improved matters.

It has a few moments here and there, more early on than later when it starts swinging around flashbacks like a blunt instrument and the direction goes from overly melodramatic to simply confused, but a weak cast and directionless plot don’t make the most of what it did have. Most importantly, it needed to be centered on an actual character with some ambition trying to actually do something, not a sponge of melodrama whose only reason for existing was to convert oxygen to angst.