天下制覇

I agree, Merry.

Semi-Impressions:

Don’t take this as an endorsement of this over Madoka quite yet. Both of them bored the living daylights out of me. The primary difference with Merry is that there was someone on IRC willing to watch it with me. That dulls the pain at least a little bit. At the moment, I think I’m leaning towards this anyway. As amusing as it is to watch Shinbo play with decoupage and call that his monster of the week, that doesn’t change the fact that there is simply no redeeming a good 17 minutes or so of either of the episodes. They’re just great empty wastelands of nothing happening. At best, one can hope for the talking heads to say something interesting, but at that point, you may as well be watching someone else read the cliff’s notes for a visual novel.

Anyway, back to Merry. Gone was any of the action or surrealness from the first episode and in its place was angst bloody everywhere. Even without having any action to animate, the show managed to get even cheaper too. I particularly enjoyed how Merry managed to eat her donuts without actually taking a single bite on screen. She would just stand there, holding it in front of her forever, then a quick cut to something else and when it returned, the entire thing had apparently been devoured by her cavernous maw. Hell, they never even actually showed her pick one up. She just reached for it, and then poof! Donut on her face. Are donuts really that hard to animate? Really?

The only saving grace was that by the end, both protagonists decided to stop moping around. Also, I guess that the flower fairy got eaten. That was sure subtle. Girl dotes on a flower which is totally not the equivilent of a fairy in a meadow of flowers. Meanwhile, its petals are constantly falling off across the screen. Then Evil McStripeypants grins menacingly at her. I bet nothing bad’s going to happen! Why should we even care? Who is this girl anyway? Isn’t it a little early in the show for them to try to be drumming up sympathy when unspecified things happen to unknown characters? Hell, I was rooting for the fairy to be mauled. Damn thing creeps me out. We didn’t even get a good pose out of the bondage attack either. Talk about a gyp.

I am also curious why the box of donuts has donuts spelled multiple ways. Were they hedging their bets? Were two different artists in charge of the side of the box and the top of the box? Are donuts and doughnuts different things in the Merryverse?

Preview:

Attack of the silly hats.