天下制覇

Those braces are pretty arbitrary rules lawyers.

Impressions:

I'm actually surprised at how restrained this was. From this kind of Japanese angst-suffering-porn, you'd expect everyone and their uncle to be looking completely aghast at every single thing happening, overreacting to the slightest pin drop with the gusto of an art student desperately trying to fill up his portfolio to impress that weird goth chick who's way too into splatter films. Of course, I'd be more impressed if it wasn't so damn boring and juvenile. The 'best' part was when she revealed her master twist, that she won the bet by default because the rules didn't say she wasn't allowed to already start with a billion balls hidden off screen, which you might recognize as the same premise behind Air Bud. That alone would be bad enough, but then that was just the beginning of her moment of triumph, as they still needed to show that the magic mouthguards force him to accept that, which they did by… him giving internal narration going "And for some reason, I accepted that." You know, maybe some angst porn wouldn't have been so bad there if that's what we're using as the alternative.

So maybe a point or two for restraint, and it feels weird saying that about a show using light S&M as revenge for being raped, but none whatsoever on the visuals, and I think if I had to assign it a score for the writing, it would be negative. This is your opening episode, where you're supposed to be setting the stage for things to come, and that's all you can come up with? Are the future contests going to be ten minutes of arguing over the rules before starting to make sure that everything is pinned down? Or is the rules lawyering going to happen afterwards, until the magic braces magically pick whoever made the better argument over their interpretation of the exact semantics over nebulous terminology. The answer, of course, is that every character is just going to be an imbecile.

Next Episode:

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