天下制覇

This season feels like it's having a particularly rocky start.

Impressions:

I spent a while writing and deleting sarcastic opening remarks for this episode, but I couldn't find anything that adequately gets across how creepy, disturbing, and utterly oblivious the whole thing is. The female lead spends literally the entire episode being ogled, berated, physically assaulted, accused of theft, so on and so forth, and the only person who shows her an iota of caring, attention, or understanding, is our sad sack protagonist, who himself, has spent the entire episode ogling her, screaming at her, berating her, and stalking her. But he also stuck up for her twice, and was struggling with his feelings, so that makes it not only okay, but super romantic.

Both characters are ridiculous. Boringly ridiculous. The worst kind of ridiculous. She's a doormat that exists solely for him to come to her rescue so she can lavish affection on him. He's a sad sack who they're romanticizing the hell out of while doing all the things that he's supposedly rescuing her or protecting her from. All of this happens through a constant pastel haze, where occasionally his thoughts become letters floating in the sky as a kind of directoral laziness to underscore the emotional weight of his insecurity. You know, like changing a period to an exclamation point makes a presentation more convincing! Or was it sarcastic? I can't even tell anymore.