天下制覇

Witness the girl of only one face!

For whatever inane reason, Crunchyroll decided to 'simulcast' this last night, around 12-16 hours before the actual broadcast, which still technically won't happen for another few hours. Kudos all around, team.

Impressions:

Four and a half minutes into the episode, and we've had multiple montages of scenery and had the protagonist declare that she has regrets. Gee, hold onto your asses for this roller coaster. And then the bluegrass kicked in at the halfway point and it was time for… another montage! It might have been preferable though because the protagonist that the elevator music follows around is as interesting as wallpaper paste. All she's capable of doing is staring blankly and being vaguely okay with whatever, and this is the character around whom all the melodrama and montages turn. Even something as banal as recreational softball can't go by without montage and gigantic melodramatic pissfest about doing their best and having no regrets.

And therein lies the issue. So much of this episode isn't spent developing the relationship between the two characters that it apparently was supposed to be about at the end. It's just banality after banality, and then she ascribes some kind of massive meaning to it. This character probably can't even take a dump without a montage, life-affirming declaration, and swelling music celebrating the joy of youth. I've had great dumps, but never that great. But even that's only sometimes. Especially in the first half, there are long bits where it's just random nothingness for the sake of teenagers. Bitch, I did my time with the Gilmore Girls. Don't bring this weak-ass nothing focused on characters who do nothing but stare blankly and call it drama. You don't even know from drama. I will bury you in drama. And what drama needs, always and forever, are strong characters the audience cares about. I get the feeling that instead of starting with characters who the author wanted to tell the stories for and give them challenges to overcome, they started with the melodrama and then did the absolute minimum to create characters that would fit into it.