天下制覇

Stop ruining everything, Japan.

Impressions:

The start of the new season (not counting sequel seasons that began yesterday) commences as it no doubt intends to continue, with a completely formulaic half-assed spew of cliches with minimal effort put into production, characters, or story, but some cleavage and a whole lot of simpering around; going to school, eating dinner, going to school again, and gawking at cleavage. Boy meets girl, boy gets manhandled, girl gives boy power, boy manhandles guy. Some shows try to get through this in the two minutes before the OP plays. Admittedly very few. Some waste an entire 20 minutes setting up that generic boy is generic, and a boy. And the girl is a girl. This would fall into the latter camp, with unfortunately a legion of company.

I think this catches me in a particularly poor mood because it goes straight to a callback to something else (plus T&A), and then spends the rest of the episode creating something utterly and totally devoid of any identity of its own that has been done in a hundred thousand other shows without even the barest thought of adding its own flavor or twist to the formula. It's all just so tired. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy severed arms as much, if not more, than the next guy. But you're blowing your load in the first episode, and it's not even about the severed limbs for you, is it? It's about the characters all grunting and crying just off-screen. Hell, they don't even stop talking for more than maybe 5 seconds after being reduced to just a head and cleavage. The conversation while they're both laying on the ground 'dead' lasts for nearly two goddamned minutes. That's almost four times as long as any actual 'fighting' that takes place. If that's what the 'action' in this 'action show' is going to be,