天下制覇

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Impressions:

What a strange episode. The easiest thing to focus on would be the production side, because the director is definitely going absolutely ham with every single filter and overlay he can get his hands on while the animators didn't bother to show up. It's more difficult to sum up whatever the hell is going on with the writing, because it was nigh incomprehensible. I think my favorite part though was how much adieu was made over his terrible secret as we then went on to reveal that he's intersex to pretty much every single person that he randomly ran into, with a heavy emphasis on random. We keep cutting back and forth between randomly running into royalty… royalty we're at war with, mind you, in the woods, and being screamed at in the castle for being a demon, frequently by his own imagined personification of his female side as a male Joan of Arc that also sexually assaults him.

Maybe just a summary of the last eight or so minutes would best illustrate the madness that is the script. Richy Rich escapes the invasion by chasing his pet pig through a random secret passage into the woods just to run into a dude ranting incoherently about the nature of time and how heavy it is the head that wears the crown, only to immediately turn around and go back, where apparently the invasion was successful, the castle fallen, and discount Joffrey is dressing people up in fetish suits having already finished all his interrogations and now ready to gloat and molest. Less than a minute later, the castle has been de-vaded and now we're re-meeting the pig's original savior, Girl Of Random Forest Encounter #3. 

You can't complain about slow pacing here in any case, but there are shades of grey between nothing happening and a runaway train barreling out of control, especially when half the things that 'happen' end up not actually meaning anything. It's also hard to call this particularly character driven or strong on that front when it's all just Dick yelling "MY BODY!" or other characters yelling "YOUR BODY!" He's intersex. I get it. It tortures him, but also a lot of dudes like to caress him. Not feeling like we're treating the supposed gender issues here with the right brush, to be totally honest.