天下制覇

And apparently nobody thinks much of it.

Impressions:

Hmm. This is going to be complicated. Let’s start with the bad. Stop zooming in on random backgrounds and reusing shots. It’s the first bloody episode. I get it, you can draw walls. Second, the brothers are… ugh. It’s like listening to a bipolar Eeyore. Even before the incest at the very end. Your sister just woke up from the dead speaking in a disembodied voice and… nothing? We’re all just going to take this in stride? Nobody cares that death just sort of… stopped? And third, they’re laying on certain themes far too thickly, particularly the nihilst stuff. I get that they’re going for a disconnect between reality and some kind of childish idealized fantasy, but lines like "her destiny was death" just make me roll my eyes and want to beat someone with a Psych101 textbook.

However, I do believe that there’s a lot going on here with both imagery and direction, and it is mostly very carefully constructed. Unlike God’s Dolls, the disconnects in tone are clearly done on purpose, particularly with the childish idealized artwork (backgrounds especially) and all the "I hate life, God, and destiny" stuff that keeps getting tossed out. I do think that it veers a little too far on the side of overblown imagery for the sake of having imagery rather than trying to exemplify some theme in the episode, particularly the transformation sequence/stripper show/heart-ripping scene complete with annoyingly loud insert song towards the end, but I suppose given its Utena heritage, that’s not terribly surprising either. Hopefully the show won’t abuse that sequence every episode like Utena did with its castle intro nonsense. And don’t for an instant think that I didn’t notice that Himari’s robot shot something out of its crotch area to link with crotch of her brothers’ one either.

So… I’m not really sure. It’s intriguing, which is something I don’t think often, and certainly more thought went into putting this together than most other shows, but I’m not sure what else to say beyond that yet. As far as this single episode goes, I think it’s more concerned with looking deep and meaningful than creating the characters and world that it’s going to need to make those themes have actual impact instead of being just intellectual masturbation. Hopefully that’s just a hook and it’ll build its characters better in the future. It did make it through the Thursday gauntlet of 7 shows in the upper echelon though, so I’ll give it another look or two over the next weeks when I haven’t been battered by two hours of other shows prior to it, but I really hope they ease off on the heavy handed philosophizing directly at the audience. Maybe replace it with more chest ripping… Mmmm… chest ripping…