天下制覇

What a strawman to defeat to save the day.

Sorry, I'm a bit more behind than I planned. Saturday ended up being a full day affair, and Sunday… well, my flight was supposed to go through IAD, which was apparently covered in thunderstorms, so that was an exhausting ordeal adding about an extra 3 hours in airports to what was already a very long day. I'll get through all of Saturday's shows today, but it'll be spread out through the day. From what I've gathered though, all the endings of everything were pretty godawful.

Impressions:

Come on, anime. The Anchorman joke of escalating violence with increasingly bizarre rival groups crawling out of the shadows for a giant brawl was right there. But no, that was just a throwaway joke about three other random groups with honestly pretty indistinguishable from the 'main' groups' traits. Then came a montage of one character from each of the previous episodes before they declared their friendship and trying their bestest, which won the hearts and minds of all, but forgot to have any jokes in it at all. At least pull some kind of Air Bud nonsense here, guys. 

In the end, I appreciated this more for what it could have been than what it actually was. What it actually was is pretty unremarkable, but it did have some comedy that reminded me of the older time when the default of Japanese anime humor was more absurdism and less screaming. It did get me to pull out some old Pani Poni Dash and Punie episodes and remind myself that yes, the old humor really was weird, abstract, craziness, and it's not just rose colored glasses for a time that never existed. A few of this show's episodes could have gone in that direction, but ultimately, and ironically, wasn't actually dedicated enough purely to comedy to really be genuinely funny.