The Executioner Girl’s Virgin Road #01 — Pretenders

April 1st, 2022

 

Pretending to be cliche and bad is a dangerous game.

Aharen does air today, but it airs super, super late, so god only knows when it'll show up.

Impressions:

If you were trying to subvert expectations, it might be a good idea to not give away the game in the title, or the opening shot of the show. At the very least, you can cut right to the gist, not faff around for half the damn episode, pretending to be the obnoxious thing that you're supposedly subverting. You can't unring a bell, and the danger of pretending to be something annoying and crappy, especially for so long, is that you become the thing you're pretending to be. But then it stops that, changes to a mopey flashback, before getting all fanservicey and fillery instead with silly costumes. The fight at the end was also not great, but I was admittedly distracted trying to figure out what the hell was going on with the music during it.

Speaking of which… Even aside from the tone being all over the place, the scoring looks at that and goes "Yo, let's crank this mess up to eleven." The music is just plain bad across the board. Unfitting and weird, especially during the out-of-place groping and costume fetish scene where it goes practically penny arcade, followed by the soldiers showing up so it goes all flamenco for god only knows what reason. There is no cohesion whatsoever, yet it is also ridiculously loud and intrusive. It's also a hard sell that about the psychotic setting of summoning kids just to murder them for having been summoned. Because power corrupts and/or is dangerous, and needs to be left in the hands of the fascist secret police who are super powerful themselves. I don't think the show actually understands either how psychotic or hypocritical it is and is just relying on "Look at how we're subverting cheat power stuff!" …Right before it just does cheat power stuff anyway.

Posted in Virgin Road | 5 Comments »

5 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Kitsu says:

    In never moment is trying to subvert expectations, she killing off the isekai kid isn’t meant to be a plot-flipping surprise the MC is an executioner is right in the title the episode drops indicators right from the start that Menou isn’t what she seems. It didn’t give us 22 minutes pretending to be just another generic isekai power fantasy with a potato protagonist. It only takes 10 minutes for his butt to end up dead on the floor—and that 10 minutes is used to introduce us to the world more than anything else.

    I remember that you complained about nana for pretending to be generic and only focusing on her plot twist.
    Exactly what do you really want?

    • Aroduc says:

      There are many better approaches. More fully commit to the deception while still executing the ‘generic’ well, like Ga-Rei Zero, or even Madoka. Tell a GOOD or compelling story that sucks you in and makes you forget the premise like Shigofumi. Hell, be a full blown cynical satire of it since we’re not committing to it anyway.

      A generic story can still be executed well, but the first ten minutes of this were neither compelling nor interesting, with the payoff moment for pretending to be schlock already given away. Especially when the ending is going to be changing its mind and being exactly that anyway.

  • Joshua says:

    I mean, one could make a decent premise out of the title perhaps, by making it essentially a fantasy version of a dystopia novel where the people are oppressed by a corrupt government and are fed propaganda about the people who are isekai’d into their world, so that’s where you have the executioners come into play to kill them because they’ve been conditioned into believing that these potato guys are a massive threat to their society. And like any dystopian novel, one of these executioners starts to realize that she’s been lied to all this time after an inciting incident with one of the isekai’d folks and plots to escape this hellhole even if costs her life.

    Sadly, I doubt they’d be this clever enough to actually go all out with this premise, content with just appealing to isekai haters, rather than say, be an anti-consumerist satire about the need by corporations to keep pumping out wish-fulfillment power fantasies set in another world.

    • Aroduc says:

      The extended premise that it only sort of got to at the end is that the newly transported girl's power makes her unkillable, so they go on an adventure together instead.

      So not really trying to appeal to those either.