Taimadou Gakuen 35 Shiken Shoutai – 06
*NOM*
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Well this has been a week of ups and downs for me in the “has an awful cold” department, which I why I haven’t been rushing out any posts the past couple of days. So this one is a day late for that reason. The latest for Aria AA will have to wait for a double up next week, or a series wrap up for other reasons. But….how did this two parter for Usagi wrap up? |
Usagi the Rabbit takes a bite out of derp….
I guess some families like to weed out their gene pool early…
We start with some fill in on Usgai’s past and backstory. She’s become the her families’ pariah due to, well, derpitude. When she was much younger, she and her brother were playing and he wandered off and started messing around with a hunting rifle and accidentally shot himself to death while she was trying to get him to put it down. So yeah, she get’s blamed for basically some stupid ass adults leaving a loaded high powered rifle around for small children to get ahold of. Perfectly reasonable right? She was the voice of reason, so yeah, she’s just gonna go along with the stupid ass adults and keep the blame…
The Tenmyoji’s have more fun with their weeding out process as it involves time and other factors….
This would be one thing, but enter one Tenmyoji as a child as well. His family, for all intents, starts raising their kids to be perfect little shits at an early age; cause you know, why wait? Or maybe there is something in the water around where these rich families raise their brood that encourages stupid and caustic in their male children from the womb. But regardless of what is bred in the bone, little Tenmyoji has all the tact of a water buffalo in heat and just starts slapping Usagi into the shape he wants her in soon after her’s brother’s funeral. In a better story she would have let him play with a loaded rifle as well…save herself a ton of trouble in the long run.
…in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed rules…
But a ton of trouble she gets anyway. Tenmyoji sees her as his possession, so that’s just a queue for a long list of well-used bog standard villain tropes. About the only thing they didn’t do was make him a possessed vessel of the Mephistopheles witch; which in a better story would have been a boon. He was such a jerk to begin with, there was hardly any real benefit to having him possessed, as that would have just been more of the same.
As it stands, the Mephistopheles witch was a pretty weak character from start to finish. You would think that an entity that has reputation for badassery wouldn’t be so foolish as to make the same mistake twice, much less make it the first time. I guess she was to focused on her Generic Box of Evil as the centerpiece of her Obvious Landscaping of Doom festival project.
Good job, I guess….
Which brings me to the perfunctory actions of the main cast. With Ouka possessed this cut the main action down, put Usagi in the middle of a villain rape-plan and have Kusunagi backing her up, that cuts it down even more. So, enter the Squishy Wizard being key to zapping the evil plan down. Goodness but I hate that trope. No reasonable person would ever devise any system that leaves them 100% vulnerable; especially a young person such as Mari.
But that’s what they go with…for reasons. Ikaruga was once again delegated to support role with little fleshing out, but at least she got to explain some magical plot saving ordinance to Usagi along the way. Which brings us to the, “Just shoot them both” moment. That was groanwothy, wasn’t it? They even hung a lampshape on it, as if they were telling us they wrote the episode under deadline after a night of very hard drinking….This reduced what could have been a female character with some agency to so much “filling out of the blanks” style storytelling.
Extra Rabbits….
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As you can tell I’m not a fan of this particular episode. It was pretty much a later rinse repeat operation of the last two parter that the show told us. Empty villain, vague evil thing, characters jumping through ambiguous hoops, doing things that might add up to something that solves the problem at hand. There was little to any tension, little to any real meat, and little to any payoff as a result. They just barely furthered the characters along any sort of path that we could care about. It’s the ghost of a story. For a show involved in the supernatural that could be a good thing, but not this time around, I’m afraid…
Next Time: Later, Rinse, Repeat….
About skylion
All around nerd that enjoys just about any anime genre. I love history, politics, public policy, the sciences, literature, arts...pretty much anything can make me geeky...except sports. Follow me @theskylion
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
So Reima wasn’t possessed. He’s just an asshole. An entirely unredeemable asshole. And the show’s going to try to redeem him going forward, I bet. Cause it needs another plot line to finish off in powerpoint style.
If this series is like the outline of an anime series, this storyline was the one turned in by the slacker kid who didn’t realize that he was supposed to turn in the outline so he threw it together before 3rd period History class.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
I had not thought one bit about Reima going forward, but yeah, he does seem like the arsehole that will loom large over the big arc upcoming….or one of them anyway…
POWUH: Meta Team and Meta-Analyst with 3844 comments
nom? It looks more like “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!” 😛
Also, bad shota. SHOtas should not smack LOLis. It should be SHOta x LOLi. 😛
POWUH: Meta Resident and LN Informant with 1529 comments
I’ve heard novel readers say the anime’s been cutting out a lot of worldbuilding and details that would’ve made the interactions and characterisation more exciting.
IIRC in the novels Usagi was already a pariah from the start, being an illegitimate child. Her family had hated her since the beginning, the shooting just intensified their hatred of her.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
So the novels indulged in even more cheap melodrama? Sounds like the anime did the right thing cutting that detail out then…
POWUH: and Vampire Lover with 11746 comments
Reima got off easy if you ask me. A more intense beating, one leaving within an inch of his life would’ve sufficed. At least that much since there is hardly any worth in killing a sleaze ball like him.
This Mephistopheles bit was too short. So little happened surrounding her that her presence didn’t add any weight. Like she and her backstory (If you want to call it that) were thought of at the last minute and squeezed in some random place in the story, hoping it will seem significant to the audience. It would’ve been a different story if she had more screen time than Reima to make her menacing instead of some moderate, forgettable obstacle in the way.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
From what we know of the past six weeks so far, a great deal of the world’s backstory has been “left on the cutting room floor” before the show went to script. In that regard a bunch of it is going to lose a great deal of impact.
As for Reima and Kusunagi, I thought that was fine. As a swordsman he was cleaving to a standard to not “cut down a worthless thing”. Plus, as a comment points out earlier, they have to save his angst up for some sort of trial in the later stages of the story, such as it is…
POWUH: Meta Resident and LN Informant with 1529 comments
Not just the backstory, but readers say the anime cut important plot points that tie back to developments in later volumes.
POWUH: iLurker with 9 comments
Actually about Reima
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POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
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POWUH: Meta Resident and LN Informant with 1529 comments
Reima wasn’t let off easily in the novels. Takeru gives him an extremely severe beating that should have killed him many times over.
Although Reima’s relic gives him high speed regeneration, he still feels pain from the damage and regeneration process.
So the anime cut out the part where he gets his just desserts.
In addition, Reima’s abusive, twisted nature stems from him being abused by his own family too. Most people don’t see it because he knows how to put on a front of gentleness.
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
Honestly, all the stuff you’re saying about the novels doesn’t make me think that the show would be much better if it included it. It’s not like the information given is moving anything from eye-rolly to plausible. It’s just more eye-rolly. The more the show goes on, the less I’m interested in any “world-building” that the series could try, because I have zero faith in the author’s ability to create anything interesting and imaginative.
POWUH: Meta Resident and LN Informant with 1529 comments
Antimagic’s author did state how he used to have little confidence in the material he wrote.
“AntiMagic Academy has for better or worse, a chaotic setting…formed from the unification of three plots I had for it.
No wonder it’s chaotic! What outrage are you thinking of here! How dare you submit such a thing!
Even now I remember retorting to myself like this!
(I remember how when)I started writing and (the story) turned terrible.
“What’cha’m gonna do…” I held my head after finishing volume one. (This continued into the 2nd volume)…
And this “What’cha’m gonna do…” continued after second volume. I had no idea how to continue.”
I think he eventually found his way though.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
At some point it all has to go back to the show’s production for picking such material in the first place, and for being so shortsighted as to adapt it beat by beat…If we are assuming they know how to tell a story to begin with…
POWUH: Meta Resident with 1692 comments
Looks like much of the stuff the original author included was because “a story like this has to have this in it!” Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to know how to use his building blocks to construct a decent story. Is he a first time author? Or is he a more experienced one who really isn’t too interested in this story?
POWUH: Meta Resident and LN Informant with 1529 comments
The author’s apparently written a previous LN series, Vanquish Overlord. All I know is that was only 4 volumes long.
His afterwords indicate he’s really interested in writing Antimagic, but had teething problems trying to make all the elements come together initially. He claims writing Antimagic was “an entirely new experience from my previous work.”
The rest of his afterwords are mostly him gushing on how wonderful and great boobs are. (=_=)
POWUH: Meta Resident with 1692 comments
So he does have experience, but doesn’t know how to put everything he wants to include together. Seems he’s trying to cram too much into Antimagic.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10998 comments
This rather makes me wonder if the author’s name is just a pen name that a variety of laborers write under; the sort of “pulp factory” they had for The Shadow way way way back in the day. I know I’ve compared most LN output to the pulp fiction output of the past.