The Mastermind in the Shadows #03 — Teenage Wasteland
October 19th, 2022
He pretends to be super cool but he's actually super duper ultra cool.
I did glance at Love Flops's second episode, telling myself "Maybe there will be a big twist and he'll get stabbed in the face." Instead, they all moved in with him, and he was mad because they kept walking around naked in front of him, but decided to do the 'nice' thing and let them live with him anyway. Ugh.
Impressions:
This, meanwhile, continue to beg the question, "What exactly about this is a parody or satire in any way?" and I think my patience with its crap has just about run out. On the up side, it was the first episode that didn't have him living out his fantasies of being a serial killer. On the down side, there's that bit at the start where he bashes his head against a rock until he deiriously accidentally kills himself, and then the rest of the episode is basically indistinguishable from a dozen dozen other reincarnation with cheat power things, all of which have some title like "I Wanted to be Average But…" Even the more serious of those have a few gags here and there too.
But at least it still managed to fit in some threats of sexual assault against teenagers with a forced marriage of a teacher to one of his students. We certainly can't not have that in these godforsaken shows. The budget may have collapsed to zero with the murder fantasies temporarily shelved, but that doesn't mean we still can't threaten teenagers with being sexual exploitation in between the twenty straight minutes of monologuing.
Posted in Mastermind | 2 Comments »
Ark noir
I think I get the reason why this doesn’t stick with me. It’s not supposed to be some “parody”, but another trite “what if this type of guy or gal was isekai’d” series, but here focusing on your stereotypical chuunibyo. Except that leads to another issue in that it has absolutely nothing to say about its babbling character despite hitting a potential gold mine with this one.
Just think about it, we have a moronic, chuuni potato, one who gets the nasty looks from everyone around him in the real world who “escapes” into what he thinks are his delusional fantasies to get the respect and glory he claims he wants, and it leads to commenting on the dangers of losing touch with reality. Something that I doubt this will even attempt in lieu of more “ironic” self-awareness and unironic power fantasies.