天下制覇

Did you know that we robots are robots?

Oops. I guess this airs Fridays on Tokyo MX? Except when I go to check its schedule, it did end up airing the first episode last Sunday, on Abema only, which seemingly never made its way to the internet, at least not even to any of the off-brand seedy streaming sites I'm aware of. Odd.

Impressions:

Well, on one hand, it doesn't shy away from its premise of there being a war and whatnot as much as these things usually do. There is a war still going on, random omnics are plopping into cities to shoot up the place, and it's all not just swept under the rug to make more time for chirping imbeciles to serve each other tea. On the other hand, there's still plenty of time for chirping imbeciles to serve each other tea, and most of what the premise is being used for is to crank the melodramatic music up to eleven and have the characters weep about how much they want to be friends with each other but can't because they have robo-anime illness from war-ing too hard. Yes, yes, Very tragic. Such loud music. So many fields of flowers. And all they want is to be friends. That is when they're not also doing the thing where they sit in a circle and explain the basics of the setting to each other. Did you know that you're a robot? Robots are robotic people who are made by humans to serve them. We humans are huge racists against robots, who are second class citizens, which is why we use them to fight our wars. Not a whole lot of respect for the audience.

It's hardly the first time we've seen this episode or this show, and it certainly won't be the last. Perhaps I'm too cynical, but this crap always comes off to me as insultingly insincere. Instead of telling a compelling story, it goes straight to cloying characters, too perfect and good for this world. Not even Disney princesses are this flawless in all ways. It's corny, and playing very, very loud sad music and slamming the cherry blossom-o-meter to eleven is manipulative. Someone made a frankly brilliant comment on the preview about these things, that it doesn't make a lot of sense to make WMDs that are little girl robots in frilly dresses, and would make much more sense to put retired spider-mech AIs into new bodies. I say forget even that. Just let the ED-209 work at the cafe. The greater the nightmare-bot, the better. BE NOT AFRAID CITIZEN. WHO ORDERED THE GRANDE LATTE. RESPECT THE SNEEZE GUARD OR BE ADJUDICATED. And you can still put it in a damn frilly dress or braid its hair if you really want.