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Cause… she’s in a wheelchair.

Impressions:

Significantly better than the first episode or first half or whatever you want to call it. It bothered to prepare a chalkboard to accompany the dry info dumping this time and somewhat reduced the boring school nonsense to increase the time dedicated to action. They’re still not being very convincing with the melodrama, and its just weird when the titular character is spazzing while the sad violins blare. I’m sure they think they’re trying to play off that no, this totally won’t be the eventual doom and gloom that pushes someone over some edge, but again, it’s not subtle. Wheelchair’s transformation sequence was her being tied up for Zeus’s sake. Nor are the monsters which have now grown human teeth and stingers. At least they weren’t ringing the sisters bell so hard for this one.

What was greatly improved was the focus on the action and the action itself. It’s still not great. The CGI monsters are of the “float stationlessly and shoot missiles/beams while soaking up damage until the director says that’s enough” variety. Still, there’s simply too much tragic opera constantly going on in the background and the monsters too uncanny valley-y for me to see this going in any direction but the obvious and it’s a little too hamhanded about it right now for that to be jarring, and it doesn’t have the undercurrent of psychological damage and moral ambiguity of something like Daybreak Illusion to make fighting the monsters who are just there to ruin everyone’s day cause… monsters a little more interest. They’ve got work to do for when it’s inevitably revealed that the monsters are more than that or it’s going to be just another info dump with the weight of a damp tissue. 

At the moment, I think I’d enjoy myself a lot more writing about this on Thursdays than Twin Tails. There’s certainly potential here, they’ve just telegraphed a lot of stuff far too hard, far too early, and I fear we’ll be playing the waiting game for those things to come to pass and they’ll do so in the standard “girls looking aghast then hugging it out” variety as things pretty much always tends to do. We’ll see what each does next week before I make up my mind.