天下制覇

Punch lady punches.

Sanda is the final new show for today, but I have an (annoyingly) early dinner appointment, and then evening social activities, though I expect a break between them in which I'll get to it, and possibly the two second episodes of this and the cyborg harem show thing.

Impressions:

With that unpleasantness out of the way, we can return to these awful villainess things, which yes, do not rankle me anywhere near as much, but I'd liken it to being offered charcoal instead of shrapnel. One thing that it could have had going for it is that it's an assertive girl just out ot punch jackasses. You could make an entire show around that. I have enjoyed many such shows that are basically just that. The whole Girls With Guns fad of twenty years ago was basically that. Alas, after going through all the horrible motions of declaring exactly what kind of show this is, including, I kid you not, having them outright say "This is the kind of story where you are the villainess," the first person she chooses to punch is the replacement girl, whose evilness is barely token compared to everybody else. And then, perhaps worse, it thinks to itself, "Man, I'm not sure that we actually did a good enough job showing how cliche and idiotic the guy getting punched is, so we need to spend the next fifteen minutes in a flashback doing that." 

That wasn't the problem here. That's just trying to cheat at my aforementioned game of "How much of this episode actually needed to exist?" The answer is none of it. None of that flashback needed to exist. In fact, it's just showing that all of it was plainly BS and literally every single person in the world knew it, before we finally return to the present, and every single person in the world has forgotten the things that we just showed. The scant credit it may get for beating up a bunch of cackling blue bloods has been squandered by the pointless unnecessary middle that makes the whole thing schizophrenic and inconsistent. She's the beloved idol of everybody's eyes, except this one ridiculous ass and also everybody else just off-screen despises her and trusts only him.

Now, this was a double episode premiere, and from glancing through the second episode, I do know that it largely ditches this crap to hang out with his brother, who's part of her fan club, and sends he off to go be a masked punching super hero, so that's an improvement and I'll probably get around to posting something about it given *waves hands* what this goddamned season is, so anything with even the tiniest amount of theoretical promise deserves more than a second look than I'd normally grant, but I also know that the scene of her beating up some bandits contains them screaming about how she's the world famous super punching villainess, so I can't say that I expect the writing to improve either.