天下制覇

The mind wanders.

Impressions:

At the moment, I'm definitely leaning towards just sticking with Totally-Not-Suicide-Squad for Thursday, but this might make it onto the roster if next week's episode is particularly strong. All signs seem to be pointing towards that not being the case though, but I feel like this episode was enough of a move in the correct direction that it deserves at least brief note. Specifically, it was a move to, after three episodes, finally reach the end of the introduction arc and actually kill someone. Which is to say that it finally reached the same place where Symphogear's first season was after about three minutes. 

Now, they killed the someone in the past, so it was more like retcon in that someone was already dead, the action is nowhere near to the level of Drive's (but is spread out much more evenly across the episode), and the whole thing reeks of the recent creepy "friendship is magic" social engineering that has become super pervasive in anime in recent years, all while still spending a significant portion of the episode sexualizing and objectifying the characters in various cheesecake shots and situations, so… yeah. One step forward, more than a few drunkenly staggering around.

Also, this may be a bit of a weird complaint, but the whole setting is getting weird and creepy in its refusal to allow anybody who is not a teenage schoolgirl to exist. There are no teachers or instructors at this school. No lunchladies. No janitors. No citzens being supposedly menaced by these monsters who are just squatting in empty land. They're not taking orders from anybody, or learning anything at this supposed training academy. It's just children playing with toys and I guess sometimes go take a bath or fight robots. There's no actual society, which is making it increasingly bizarre and alien.