天下制覇

Boy, those two 'super' newbies started jobbing fast.

I'm out on Saturday from pretty early until the late afternoon doing Aroduc stuff. I feel like it's still likely I subject myself to Symphogear, but it'll be fairly delayed.

Impressions:

This was also a problematic episode. It brings up a lot of good points about people teaming up to take on a greater threat, and having to fight each other once that threat is dealt with, but undermines itself by doing the opposite of introducing a greater threat. We're supposed to take Nene's hidden sniper stuff as the big threatening boss to team up against… except she was beaten by the crazy one's sidekick. I feel like maybe being set up to be the backstabbing true final boss since she was a little too competent this week, and Crazypants's entire deal is likely to be resolved with a hug and friends forever speech, but she's been way too goofy so far while the show is still struggling mightily with establishing any kind of actual stakes. Getting kicked out of the tournament isn't going to cut it. Four episodes in and we're still just getting someone in a magic coma and allusions to mom having to go away because society deems drama is necessary. Usually, these kinds of affairs have at least one person going around knifing everyone else in a win-at-all-costs manner while here they're all very politely playing by the rules. That or the price of losing being someone's life, soul, dreams, etc, not just being booted from the squatty robot meetups.

This episode was also full of rather baffling little moments which seemed like they were for some purpose, but then just get unceremoniously dropped and forgotten. Shingetsu rushes out to do… something, then simply doesn't. Mangetsu is revealed to have some kind of magic ESP that lets her detect and dodge attacks and then that's dropped and forgotten. They do this whole magical proof thing to verify Nene isn't a mage, then in the very next scene, she comes out and tells them she is. Maybe they'll pick some of those threads up later, maybe they were just lazy and needed to pad things out a little more. Probably the latter.

Next Episode:

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