天下制覇

At least this gave something to comment on.

I just picked up a puppy (while telling myself "No more puppies, never again"), so posting may be a little later than usual for at least a few weeks since it takes priority. Also, Made in Abyss's second episode contained literally no abyss, and 100% puttering around town. Thrilling. I could watch Virgin Soul for that. And speaking of which, its episode was bumming around the heavenly city, Jeanne/Nina reuniting with Whose-His-Face, and culminating with Whose-His-Face getting delusions of grandeur. That's it. That's all. Another twenty minutes of the protagonists doing jack as the plot inches along. I'm done. I'm out.

Impressions:

Not that I'm sold on this either, and this episode puts it pretty close to the edge. I have a hard time getting into this episode's headspace, let alone understanding what they were going for. A revenge-driven killer wants to kill a bunch of unrepentant killers who killed her family, and the protagonist is just like "Wow, neat. Brutal murder seems fun." There's some really flimsy crap about how she's supposedly strong, and that the trio are all extra super duper mega psychopaths, which makes it all good, but I don't buy it in the slightest. At best, the protagonist still comes off as just going right along with the flow of everything until he decides he wants to gruesomely kill someone too, just to say that he has, apparently. And nobody bats an eye.

Perhaps he's meant to be more of an antihero? I have a hard time swallowing that too though since he's mostly just apathetic to everything, and especially what the director thought was worth focusing on wasn't the girl or anything like that, but the grisly way she executed her victims. It could also be that the writing is still fairly insane, and is probably a step or two over the line of lunatic-fringe teenage power fantasy. It's totally oblivious that it's glorifying the exact behavior that it's celebrating executing people for, and my favorite… There's this bit where he notices that her arm is covered in scars from attempted suicides and remarks that therefore, she must be really strong like this is obviously self-evident. Like trying to kill yourself just makes you harder to kill the next time. I think they learned physiology from Dragon Ball.