Punch Line #05 — Dragonball

May 7th, 2015

   

And you’ve now killed all your cliffhangers until you unwrite that.

Impressions:

One day I’ll understand Japan’s manic obsession with flashbacks. Today is not that day. Tomorrow’s not looking great either. Is it part of their Writing 101? Is it their version of “Show don’t tell”? That would explain a lot. Then again, but so would them simply not having Writing 101 at all, which this episode (and the show as a whole) is continuing to make a rather strong case for. That’s right. Dangling preposition. Deal with it. The subtext of that is that now with time travel being used as a freebie plot device to reverse death instead of just for comic relief, any melodrama over anything simply melts away, no matter what asinine crap they try to pull out. But wait, there is a limit. He has to care enough. That’s seriously the best they could come up with? Christ, Japan. You’d think the entire population were sociopaths by the way they treat basic empathy for other people. I’m looking at you, UBW. Even that might get by if they weren’t always bouncing between it and being hippie love-children who feel the pain of every single blade of grass. 

And speaking of extremes… Oh those poor children, exploited and bullied for no reason at all, victimized by the cruel world when all they wanted is friends. This is the jump scare of horror, the fart of comedy, the shakey cam of action, the ball-punch of a fist fight… at best; openly manipulative, incongruous with the character shown so far, and utterly superficial. And this is not used at its best. The rest of the episode fared little better. I’m starting to get the impression that I might as well skip to the last couple minutes. I’d get to jump right to the imbecilic twists and cliffhanger, going past all the unneeded exposition, having feelings but being insecure about them, and resetting the previous episode’s cliffhanger. This week’s would be another couple girls dying and that the masked guy also explodes with power when viewing panties. Whatever could that mean? Refer back to the first paragraph for why people dying no longer carries any weight. Refer to my butt for the rest.

Posted in Punch Line | 4 Comments »

4 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • ZakuAbumi says:
    May 8, 2015 at 9:52 am

    Next week’s twist better be fucking mind-blowing. They promised.

    It also better not be “Masked guy is the protagonist… from the future!!”. Because everyone saw that coming several weeks ago.

  • kenuran says:
    May 8, 2015 at 7:00 pm

    Next episode’s preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yq0rx28FZs

    At this point i wouldn’t be suprised if everyone just gets killed by the masked guy and the meteor that no one seems to really care about hits (again) then the MC just goes back in time to fix everything by taking back his body or whatever.

    Hell, i mean every important or seemingly important plot-point is just either just skimmed over or just flat out forgotten in place for more plot-points? that dont ever really add anything to the show outside of just being more things to remember (or forget) later on. What was the deal with the bus-jacking? What’s the deal with the bear? Why does a turtle biting your dick make you stronger? Could you please be less like a terrible video game adaptation with the arbitrary rules and infodumping and be actually be an anime? You can only possess someone if theres cinnamon dust all over the place, b-but only for exactly seven minutes okay! What the hell?

    • ZakuAbumi says:
      May 9, 2015 at 2:36 pm

      Eh, that’s Uchikoshi’s writing. Piling up as many questions as possible, largely ignoring them up until the end so he can hit you in the face until your jaw drops.

      Now, if this wasn’t a slow-paced mess with uninteresting, boring characters stuck in the house of randumbville where Uchikoshi trademarks and game gimmicks get half-assedly thrown in while the writing remains way too keen on masturbating to its foreshadowing, that might actually work. Heck, take 999. That started out with a lot of questions, hinted at a few things and only at the very end delivered all the answers that were necessary but inbetween, it managed to tell an interesting death game something story while continually pushing things forward.

      As for this… welp. “Has potential for the future” is the only thing it has going for it and that’s more like gambling and synonymous to “Not doing anything interesting for now”.