takt op. Destiny #10 — Last Minute Backstory

December 7th, 2021

 

What a shocking development.

Impressions:

It's rarely a good thing when a show has to take a timeout from the story in progress to fabricate an elaborate backstory for a character just so you care when it offs them. Oops. We forgot to develop this character. Crap, better work that in somehow. This isn't the story of a character of the week who is actively part of some ongoing whatever like Garou would do, or is the standard for Western things like Supernatural or Buffy or whatever. Lenny's been around, but existed solely to be the mouthpiece for random exposition. His only connection to the protagonists to this point was to pop up every third episode or so and say "You need to work together more, togethery." So here, for no reason, we are going to pause the big fight to give his entire goddamned backstory. Gee. I wonder why.

And it does not help how corny it all was either. Lenny has it all. Was secretly Takt's father's BFF. Was secretly watching over Takt all along. Was part of the secret Nazi society but betrayed them. And now, for no particular reason other than the bad guys are bad, we're going to fight in a random field. Oh no. Takt's conveniently run out of power in the middle of it and someone needs to stand in front of him and tank a half dozen bullets before unlocking their full power. Who could have forseen this sacrifice? At least we got a decently animated fight scene out of it, even if every single dramatic and story angle of this episode was transparently manipulative dross at best.

 

Posted in takt op | 2 Comments »

2 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • LUNI_TUNZ says:
    December 7, 2021 at 4:29 pm

    I watched Akame ga Kill once, and that show was so transparent with the “Last Minute Backstory” trope that I knew Lenny was toast 5 minutes in.

    I can accept that he wanted to secretly betray the music nazis because they actually built that up, but I rolled my eyes so hard at, “Oh and BTW, I’ve also known you since you were a child.”

    • Aroduc says:
      December 8, 2021 at 8:32 am

      I was actually thinking about Akame ga Kill as the worst abuser of the eleventh hour backstory or whatever the ‘official’ name of the trope is. It was always so awkward and bad there, and anime especially seems to feel a weird need to do it for all deaths, even when it’s a lunatic raving serial killer. Like screaming about friendship, sure, it can work, but nine times out of ten, it’s just a lazy last minute attempt to make you care about a character when the work needed to be done through the whole show.