Weekly Round-up – Dismemberment, Transvestites and Valvrave

I’m up to date on everything but Majestic Prince, this week, which can probably be called indefinitely stalled at this point. I also picked up Valvrave, because with everything else I’m watching this season being either good, or just mediocre, I needed a show to get good and angry about. Something that was just all bad, all the time, in the most hilarious ways possible. Now I’m up to date with it, turns out my opinion on it is a little more complex than that, but we’ll get to that further down.

Red Data Girl 5

Ahahahahahaha

I’m starting to see a pattern here. Even numbered episodes are entertaining, odd number episodes are snore-fests, let’s see if this trend holds. That said, episode 5 wasn’t all bad. At least we got a hint at an overarching plot point, unfortunately everything else this ep was angst and stupidity. We’re told they’re at a school of supernatural anomalies, yet nobody seems to talk about this or act differently because of it. It’s an excuse to squeeze some standard high school hijinks in there, I suspect

It also ties into the problem this show has had from the beginning, where no-one seems to act like an actual human being. They have fears and hopes, sure, but it all feels like some kind of transparent mimicry. Peel back those faces and they’re all some bug-like alien race trying desperately to blend in with human culture, but you can tell they just don’t quite get it.

The Devil is a Part-Timer! 5

Your words, not mine

Oof, I don’t even know what to say about this episode. There was mood whiplash all over the place, with attacks being treated as potentially lethal one second, then used as physical humour the next. It was mostly action, so the comedy is still MIA, save aforementioned ill-timed pieces of physical humour. The action was ok, I guess, and at least we seem to be getting all the retarded attempts at plot over with quickly. No, seriously, it honestly looks like they’re gonna go back to slice-of-life after all that. Did we go through all that serious stuff just to add a few more characters to the roster?

Honestly, I kind of hope they do, it’s just weird and horribly inconsistent to deal with serious plot that way. For some reason it just didn’t bother me that much though, so I’ll stick with it a little longer, especially since it looks like it’s going back to what it was (relatively) good at.

Oreimo S2 5

Who does? Kyousuke isn’t so much complex as incomprehensible.

Oh geez, what was it I said last week? That’s right: “unfortunately they’ll probably engineer a way to return everything to the status quo and the show’ll just keep being boring instead of hilariously bad”. Oh, look at that, she didn’t want him to be her boyfriend, just to pretend to be her boyfriend. Were I a cynical man, I’d probably think Oreimo was intentionally trying to give us the wrong impression last week just for the sake of a cliffhanger in a pathetic, calculated attempt at holding viewers’ attention. Thankfully I’m much too wholesome and good-natured to think such thoughts.

On the plus side, Kuroneko looks like she’s gonna feature more for a while, which is good, because as Scamp pointed out, you can fairly well determine how good any episode of Oreimo is by taking the amount of screen-time Kuroneko gets, and deducting from that the amount of screen-time Kirino gets. The more positive number you get, the better the episode is. Bonus points for Kirino’s shitty friend Ayase not turning up that ep.

Muromi-san on the Shore 2-5

The animal jokes are still the best bits

This show’s been much the same episode to episode. Occasional great bits of humour interspersed by mediocrity. Watching a mermaid take out her grudge on dolphins because of a bad experience with one of their prehistoric ancestors who failed in his ambitions to take to the land is just my kind of absurd humour. It’s not got a bad message, either. Muromi’s independence and lust for exploration is encouraged and portrayed as one of her strengths, in fact it was actively pitted against idle beauty in the most recent episode, with her independence and worldliness placed as more important than the beauty she sacrificed for it. For anime that’s down-right subversive.

So yeah, this show still gets my tentative approval, with its solid comedic timing and competent execution of so-so material.

Attack on Titan/The Eotena Onslaught 5

Nawwwww

Image courtesy of twitter.

I’ve been saying for the last two weeks that this show only really shines for me when everything is completely %$@#. Sure enough, tits went skyward this week and it was pretty awesome all the way through. I’m glad they didn’t kill off Armin, that would have been really cheap and predictable. On the other hand, I laughed out loud in the middle of what was meant to be a terrifying, grim-dark scene when Eren, last seen unconscious and missing a limb, godamn teleported into the Eoten’s mouth, then proceeded to hold its freaking jaw open while Armin escaped. Seriously, the power suits let Gantz get away with this kind of shit since it had its own kind of internal logic, here it just made no sense. So yeah, keep it real, Eotena Onslaught.

As a side note, anyone who actually thinks Eren is dead must be hopelessly naive.

My Youth RomCom SNAFU 5

Taking the piss out of Shoujo tropes never fails to amuse

This show definitely shouldn’t try to tackle serious issues. Its attempt at painting a heart-warming story of familial relations wasn’t so much bad as barely even there at all. The episode was supposedly about this brother and sister’s issues, but we spent most of it contriving excuses to the dress up the female protagonists in various cute outfits. Then there was the cliffhanger at the end of the episode, if you can even call it that. Cue silly drama and non-stop cliché. It’s a pity, because I’m actually starting to like the characters. Well, Protag and Yuigahama, anyway. All the characters are pretty shallow, but Yukinoshita manages to be actively annoying, and lacking any of the charisma some of the other characters have, so yeah, still don’t give a toss about her.

I think some of the best moments of this series have been where they took the joke about Protag’s loner behaviour to the extreme, like the tennis match he won using techniques he’d developed to be able to play sports entirely by himself. Welp, hopefully they’ll at least get the drama over with quickly like they seem to be doing with The Devil is a Part-Timer!

Valvrave the Liberator 1-4

Yes, that is a helicopter…

Hoh boy, this show. After watching episodes 1-3 I posted this on twitter: “I sometimes have trouble specifying all the tropes I hate in anime, so it was awful nice of Sunrise to make an itemised list of them and call it Valvrave. They even presented the list as some kind of absurd, parody anime, though I’m sure some silly sods will think it’s for real…”

So yeah, come episode 4 I was all ready to just run with that twitter post and lambaste this show for a good few paragraphs for its immense stupidity and obvious attempts at cashing in on certain popular series. Then I watched episode 4, and THAT happened. Yes, you know what I’m talking about. The part where the MOTHERFUCKING HIGH SCHOOL DECLARES ITSELF AN INDEPENDENT STATE. Fuck, maybe this is a parody. Maybe a whole bunch of otaku are gonna be laughing at all the ridiculous shit happening and all the cliché, meanwhile this show is laughing at them. I kind of hope so, that would be awesome. Seriously, the parts that immediately follow that section really look as if they’re trying to point and laugh at how ridiculous what just happened was. If it is a parody of action/mecha/Code Geass, though, it’s a little late to that party.

So yeah, whether this is taking the piss, or just hilariously bad, I’mma keep watching for the lolz.

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet 5

I don’t know, Ledo, I just don’t.

Well, that escalated quickly. Actually, what’s the opposite of escalate? De-escalate? How boring. Well yeah, that de-escalated quickly. No sooner than I begin to unambiguously praise Gargantia does it suddenly soil itself with whatever the hell you want to call that episode. Offensive, boring and immensely dumb, would not watch again.

Seriously though, that was a beach episode without a beach. In one fell swoop Gargantia managed to objectify its entire female cast, reducing them to fetishes and the usual female anime character tropes of talking incessantly about dieting and “getting a man”. Did you know the character designer for this show has done a lot of porn? Not really surprising, is it. Insultingly vacuous, actively destructive to the world it set up, Gargantia has gone from one of my favourite shows of the season to the show I most want to drop, and I guess that’s impressive in its own way. Episode 4 built up enough good will for me to stick with this, but please pull yourself together Gargantia. I really want to like you.

The Flowers of Evil 5

Moe!

I’m running out of ways to praise this show week to week. What can I say, they’re still completely nailing it. If you’re not watching this, you’re missing out.