天下制覇

All of these people re imbeciles.

Reminder: I'm out of town until Monday. Symphogear's no doubt amazing conclusion (ha) and whatever Fate is spitting out as the start of its second half will half to wait until then.

Impressions:

As big a trainwreck as I expected the ending to be, it managed to surpass my expectations and somehow be even more terrible, and worse, more boring. Eve's entire thing is tht she's mad that God's rule is women are supposed to obey men, so all the witches show up and tell her "Nah, men obey us. Also, believe in yourself." And then, having done literally nothing at all but fetch tea for the entire episode, Haruto futzes away with her to parts unknown. The end. That's right. The big finale was a twenty minute misguided speech about gender politics and self-esteem, followed by "Haruto is the best, because… He just is! Okay!?" Eve herself didn't even put up any arguments at all, or hell, even try to fight back; just swallowed all the drivel heaped her way and said "Yeah, sure. I feel better now for talking to someone about it. Guess that's all I needed after all!" 

And then the artists and animators cried because this was still somehow too much effort for them because most of this episode looked like fried garbage.

Final Thoughts:

The writing for this was a hot steaming mess, even among Japanese media. The protagonist was a complete nobody whose personality varied wildly from episode to episode, yet somehow also managed to hardly be a part of the story except as a McGuffin to show up and resolve everything. The witches themselves, thankfully more of the focus of most episodes, were a bit better, but it could've stood to do with about half as many since they started repeating pretty early, and come up with something a little better than "everything is solved with the presence of a generic man in the picture." A lesson that is especially bizarre given what it then claimed to the big deal was all about.

It was at least a little ambitious, so that probably still puts it ahead of countless other things, but it still had two out of the final three episodes spent entirely on talking heads rambling without making an iota of sense, or taking particularly superficial, yet still bizarre, positions on complex issues. So maybe it was just a chance for some directors to stretch their legs while the writers were snuffing paprika that they thought was cocaine. It wasn't anywhere near as intelligent as it thought it was. Probably the best moments were when it shut up and was just atmospherically weird. Again, not high marks in its favor, but a lot more than many other shows manage, so I guess it's at least occasionally distinctive.