Hidan no Aria AA – 10
Love Hotel! or Murder Hotel?
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Well, I’m going into day five of my tobacco cessation (I’ve quit smoking), and things are just peachy! Yeah, I’m a bit crabby, but that goes with the territory. Luckily the anime is getting better and I’m glad to say that AA is no exception…. |
U and I
If you can just keep them from stalking each other, they should make a great team…
Well, it’s hardly shocking that the girls have a not-so-light past, they did a pretty good job leading into that territory in the program’s early days. But it’s good to see the writers can cross the t’s and dot the i’s without turning the story into a vehicle for an excessive amount of exposition or backstory. They have a past, it’s complex and rich without being burdensome to the audience, and it puts the weight on Akari’s current actions and how they effect the rest of the story. She’s a bit of a silly git, isn’t she? But she isn’t evil or manipulative like her opposition clearly is. So when Akari hides the truth, it doesn’t come off as deliberate or damning; just foolish and callow.
It’s lucky she has friends; a solid nakama built up by weeks and weeks and weeks of stalking, skinship, yuri-bonding, and uh….built up by weeks and weeks of training and effort. So when Aria corrects Akari, you know where they both stand. I especially love how Aria admonished her former potential partner, that is if Akari had just been upfront about all of this, that if she could trust as much as she admired, then this situation could have been avoided, or potentially curtailed. I like how the first obstacle a protag has to clear is themselves.
I-U
I really liked the transitions in this scene (the booty weren’t bad either!)
This is probably where is the story comes out the weakest. I’m hoping they address this by next episode, because if they don’t they we are falling for a group of villains/antagonists that are evil for the sake of it. They do it for the lulz, or because no one (the writers both original and/or adaptation) could be bothered to give them proper motivation. As it stands, the AA nakama does have a fairly strong opposition despite those misgivings. Kyouchikutou is mysterious, poisonous, and rancorous enough to give a good girl pause, and she should. Those combinations have been proven to be damning enough on a person, in the form of Nonoka’s now near deadly condition. Who knows what other traps the LOLi in black has laid previous?
I like this kind of enemy; she’s got the juice, but I want to see more of the personality. Outside of that, she has the potential to force the good guys to think outside the box, and lift the story above a simple “i shoot you, arrgh you get disarmed!” motifs something like poorly thought out action typically brings. Kyouchikutou is presented as almost magical in her own way, but since they have these are secret sorts of ninja techniques that date back to the Shougunate, we all know it’s tricks and misdirection, and thus beatable with the right amount of mettle. Should be a good fight. It’s a race against time after all, so I hope they can give Nonoka some agency despite being poison ridden…
Looks like she’s finally ready to kick ass and take names….
Yep, we got quite a bit more bottom this time around (no, not that bottom there’s been plenty of that!). I’m going to be forgiving going in to this final arc, but should I? Unless Kyouchikutou has the most demanding of back-stories, there is little if any reason to hide it as the series has gone by. By giving the audience the first battle this late in the game, the story runs the risk of making the character just seem like a random throw down, with little if any umph! And this story needs more umph! They’ve played alright with the yuri cuteness, but I want some welly in the action department….
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 Meta-Analyst with 3844 comments
Error: You are not authorized to enter Room 401. Please upgrade your authorization first. Thank you.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10997 comments
I kinda like that they actually planned that out in production. Given what the hotel looks like on the outside, they were in room 401….
POWUH: Meta Team and Meta-Analyst with 3844 comments
The very least, it’s not Room 404. The Missing Room.
POWUH: 400-499 with 462 comments
…Damn. Why do the hot ones have to be poisonous? That dressing scene was quite a show, but that girl is horrifyingly evil, you just know you’d probably be poisoned just by touching her.
Ahem. Anyway, with all her vanishing (and floating?!) tricks, I have to wonder if she’s even actually there in the first place. You make a good point by bringing up nija clans: there’s probably some visual trickery going on. Or supernatural power, that sometimes happens too.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10997 comments
Kyou was getting almost a Poison Ivy ala Shumacher’s Batman and Robin level of performance….
But yeah, ninja powers are weird. They’re a secret passed down the generations, and they can be stolen! It’s like you have to hold your hands in the right pattern, arrange your internal organs by force of will (via meditation, which is just sitting still and shutting up and relaxing…a lot…), eat the right chi-berry mix potion thingy and VOOOM! Powers. It’s the million monkeys-million typewriters thing. One of us regular folks should have ninja powers just by accident….maybe even a bunch of us!
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
The imbalance between the abilities of the bad guys and the good guys in this show just makes me facepalm, especially when the good guys think they’re going to storm in and win. That the show even allows them to win is farcical. Kyouchikutou destroyed an entire village of assassins. Is broken assassin Akari really going to have a chance one-on-one? Not in anything approaching reality (I do realize that I’m talking about “an entire village full of assassins” in the same breath as “reality”, so there is an understanding about the unreal nature of the show).
Unfortunately, now we’re to the part where the Aria stories always fall flat. The backstories and character interactions aren’t terrible, but the fights are. They always are. And I’ll be pleasantly surprised if this one isn’t a complete suckfest.
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10997 comments
Highway and I have disagreements on how to properly suspend disbelief. But he stubbornly holds on to the fact that the women of the middle ages gave birth to panzer divisions and lived to tell the tale. As for Kyouchikutou, she could have gotten really lucky the day she raided the village…or the ninja village was having a reaaaal bad day? Besides, this is Team Akari you’re picking on. So full of Piss and Vinegar they dont’ know what they’re doing until they do it….
POWUH: Meta Team and Spammy Tamer with 7115 comments
Well, they certainly did give birth to the armies of the Crusades, and the armies that resisted them…
It’s Team Akari, and they have plot armor, so when it matters, they don’t suck like they do all the rest of the time. But it’s more that I’m picking on the show, which just blithely writes these things and expects us to just accept that a team made up of 4 first years and a middle schooler is going to be able to effectively take on someone with a proven record of ruthlessness and efficacy.
One particular stupid incident: They go in the hotel and Akari takes the elevator up to the 4th floor. Whyyyyy? It *should* be a complete trap, especially going into the lair of a poisoner. But nah, it works out. And what was the point of Shino not going up to the fourth floor? Is she guarding the elevator? Really? Against what, the people who come in from outside… that Raika was supposed to be covering?
POWUH: and LOLi Defender with 10997 comments
…they also gave birth to the low-renters that carried the black death….
I have to admit, I pretty much saw the last five or so minutes as pure set-up…characters left where they were for the next episode…
POWUH: 400-499 with 462 comments
While it was a dream, so this may be taken with a grain of salt, there was a glimpse of what looked like a werewolf in Nonoka’s flashback in the beginning of the previous episode. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that whatshername had support from the rest of her organization in the original destruction of the Mamiya clan, whereas now she appears to be operating solo (unless you count Rico, and I don’t, since Rico is clearly only helping when their interests align).
That doesn’t mean she isn’t still more deadly than the entire group of kids put together, normally. I’m actually rather hoping that she stomps them, and Akari ends up killing her reflexively when she’s about to kill one of the others.
POWUH: 400-499 with 462 comments
Oy! Put that comment back, spammy!