天下制覇

That was a weird sequence.

Symphogear will be a little delayed tomorrow as I'm occupied tomorrow morning with dog-related activities. I hope to be away from downtown again before the Nazis descend, so… hopefully not too delayed.

Impressions:

Well, I'd like to say that they probably did about the best that they could have, but the best would have had Shingetsu at any point accepting her blame and responsibility in driving Anna completely insane. I couldn't even pretend like we were in some parallel reality where that was the case (or that Suishou was the one who drove her around the bend) since they kept bringing up how 'nice' and 'considerate' Shingetsu was by arrogantly determining years ago that Anna was just irrevocably terrible and had to give up on all her dreams. Really seemed like she was holding her own pretty well there on nothing but rage and making silly faces.

So maybe it's better to say that the director did a solid job, and this probably could've been a really good episode if the writing wasn't constantly undermining everything. That was particularly evident in the long expositional aside in the middle and towards the end especially. In one case, Anna jumps into a long lesson about how using fire and ice is particularly effective… but I have no real idea how or why since everything was just explosions. Shingetsu also pulled about a dozen random things out of her ass, which also took the form of a bunch of transformations and explosions, but since she's the protagonist/winner of the fight, the explanation came afterward. How much nicer it was when mechs were just sprouting flaming limbs and ice weaponry from pure rage. That didn't need explaination and was far cooler than an overlong lecture declaring that mixing fire and ice is so much better than just doing fire or ice because… shut up, that's why.

Next Episode:

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