天下制覇

Alas, poor Tenshi, I miss you already.

Impressions:

Well this was one tiny step forward in one aspect and about eight steps backwards. This episode was pretty much all drama from start to finish, and very little of it handled well. First off, the art and animation this week was horrible for this show. Deformed heads, poorly drawn eyes, literally minutes worth of stills as they sat around dumping melodrama out of nowhere. Seriously. We’re halfway through the show now, and you want to take 5 minutes out to show a barely animated melodramatic waste of time about how sad a character is that he couldn’t make pots. Said character has had under sixty seconds of screen time before this episode, and only marginally more than that prior to learning that he wants to be God… and a potter. And apparently he can mindrape you. How? Who knows. Luckily, the power of homosexual hugging cures all ills.

I also despise the direction they decided to go with Tachibana’s character here. She went from mysterious superpowered cypher to just another airheaded ditz made to directly pander to the same crowd drooling over the legion of other airheaded ditzes already in this show. The violence also didn’t really have much of an edge either. After watching them get beaten, crushed, drowned, and cut in half for jokes, it’s hard to take seeing a couple beaten up bodies as particularly shaken. The one thing that I think this episode did do right, however, was the revisiting of Yuri’s dark past. I really liked the imagery of the coffins flashing between her siblings, particularly because it wasn’t immediately obvious what they were. A soft touch like that would do absolute wonders for the rest of the overblown horrible drama that this show loves to spew out. Plus, TK had I think four or five lines! One of which was a Terminator quote! That’s a plus if ever there was one.

The cliffhanger at the end was also exceedingly stupid. The flashback just cuts off in mid