天下制覇

 Oh No! Nipples!

I'll get to Reincarnated as a Sword from yesterday in a few hours, but spoiler: The promos lied. It's status screens as far as the eye can see.

Impressions:

It's funny to me that the way they do a sex reveal is by showing nipples. After all, can't show female nipples. It's also weird that they're pulling out the androgynous vampire and showing him to genuinely be quite sociopathic to those around him while also making declarations like "I understand you because I too, have a penis." This is the first actual vampire that isn't denying themself that probably is going around driving people insane and ruining lives solely for giggles. Probably should've come at the start of this whole existential crisis, not as part of the resolution.

Somehow, that leads to the conclusion that you can have fun at night, so worries about vampires are dispelled… for now, because we need something sort of like an ending. It's the same problem I've had with Kou's entire character for the whole show's run. It never actually sold that he was bored or listless. Hell, he gives this whole speech about how Nazuna is what made the night fun, except that there were whole episodes of him hanging out with his other friends and having a blast, even hiding it from her. There is no difference in what they showed of his life and behavior without her and with her. And there's no resolution to the vampire hunter arc, or basically anything whatsoever. Just an abrupt lurch back to the status quo from a couple episodes ago and an insincere speech.

The start had some interesting insights and character moments, nicely hitting both emotional and properly framing relationships and interacting with other people while the characters struggled to express themselves… mostly. I can't help but also think back to the character who was told "Just suck it up and let your boss abuse you because you can technically quit," so it even then, it was problematic. But it went strongly downhill as soon as it introduced the other vampires. Nearly all of them put forth some deeply problematic views, and then the final vampire hunter arc bit was a huge mess before the "read the manga for the rest!" ending. The script badly needed another few passes in the second half at the bare minimum.