Maybe the show just didn't like me, seems as soon as i took a back seat, the show was content with improving content haha.
Though if (big if) i was to try it again, i will wait until it finishes and see what peoples final verdict is... or at least binge 4 episodes a day so i know if it is/isn't worth it.
And we're kind of back to how the first couple of episodes went.
I'm pretty sure the major joy-suck in this show is Upbeat Roommate, who I think is actually the main character, unfortunately. She's boring and vapid and utterly uncharismatic. In fact, our Good Guy Squad's magical girl trio are the least interesting characters in the main cast--and by a fair margin. They have, for the most part, very little going on, though Momo's connection to the details of the plot (which they are still keeping from us (or which, perhaps, they assume we know from the game I haven't played)) and Ruka's main personality trait at least make them...if not likeable then at least satisfactory characters. But Upbeat Roommate is just bad. And whenever the story needs her to be the important one, whenever the plot tries to revolve around her, every bad thing about the show quickly takes up orbit around her, with the episode becoming dull and confusing.
Miyako, on the other hand, is great fun every time she pops on screen, bringing some much-needed zest and sharpness to our Blue Ring Brigade's participation in the story. More of her, please.
Our Bad Guy Squad, on the other hand, is a delight and gets better every week. They've all got something interesting going on, with Niina and Uta having actual complexity to their characters, rife with hopes and desires and conflicts and struggles and actual f***ing nuance. There are personal stakes, for these two, unlike our heroes
"But Upbeat Roommate is concerned about her sister!"
...and?
Actually, while we're on this: did you notice how, at the end of the episode, when the magical flower battle world whatever goes away and Miyako runs up to join the rest of the goodies, Upbeat Roommate has a nice, dramatic collapse into a heap so Miyako can get all worried about things. Which means that, since she was already slumped on the ground when the magical flower battle world whatever was active, she pulled herself together enough to stand up juuuust long enough for Miyako to show up and watch her slump to the ground again.
and their (essentially) lovers' spat alone is more compelling than whatever the hell the magical girl stuff will eventually(?) be revealed to be about.
And then there's the Big Sister stuff, which...well, the Niina/Uta portion of that is great, of course, but even just her ominous, supervillain presence looming over or behind or adjacent to scenes seems to work, even if it is almost exclusively owing to rudimentary visual cue trickery rather than her, y'know, doing stuff.
For one of the villain characters, we went through a series of events that would paint her as someone having suffered through and through, being betrayed and betrayed. There is this huge buildup to a conclusion that would snap her character in two, but nothing happens. It feels empty and you could do without such a lengthy backstory if all you're going to do is paint her as having a tragic background. Nothing really weighty happens that affects the story in the present. It's a waste of time.
^ in more lengthy words. I wrote my last comment at 7 in the morning, still drunk on sleep depravation and that was the best that I could write down.
There is this huge buildup to a conclusion that would snap her character in two, but nothing happens. It feels empty and you could do without such a lengthy backstory if all you're going to do is paint her as having a tragic background. Nothing really weighty happens that affects the story in the present. It's a waste of time.
Interesting. Because I thought the backstory was really well done, all things being equal, and I thought the whole thing with wanting to split from Uta and have the ceremony to pair with Big Sister meant a heck of a lot more because we'd spent time on that. I don't think those decisions would have seemed anywhere near as significant without having watched her tale of woe. (And, of course, the subsequent fallout from absorbing the truth of Big Sister's backstory means more, too, after having seen how important it was that someone gave a damn about her.)
That said, we probably didn't need to spend quite as much time watching her be an abused little girl as we did, so...yeah, some trimming might have been nice.
Interesting. Because I thought the backstory was really well done, all things being equal, and I thought the whole thing with wanting to split from Uta and have the ceremony to pair with Big Sister meant a heck of a lot more because we'd spent time on that. I don't think those decisions would have seemed anywhere near as significant without having watched her tale of woe. (And, of course, the subsequent fallout from absorbing the truth of Big Sister's backstory means more, too, after having seen how important it was that someone gave a damn about her.)
That said, we probably didn't need to spend quite as much time watching her be an abused little girl as we did, so...yeah, some trimming might have been nice.
No, no, it's not the content of the backstory that I have a problem with, it's the climax of it. The whole purpose of a backstory, in my opinion, is to bring a character into a new(er) perspective. You will have a physical tangibility present that shows the different paths a character could take. By having this ending to her backstory nothing changed for her.
Lets say she did kill the girl, it would have broken her as a pacifist. Were she on the path to suicide, she would be a mentally broken character in a darker place than she were before. Instead we see four instances of the same character arc, and that's where I think they could have done better.
To give a character context, yes, to explain choices she's making or how she came to be who/where she is. Which I think they did pretty well, since it sets up clear reasons why she was in despair, what she wants as an escape from despair, how she came to be where she is, why she takes her role so seriously--and why it's such a problem to have found out more about her savior.
It sounds like you were expecting more of a contrast in who she was and who she is currently, or to perhaps change how we see her more than you felt it did (whereas I think it turned me around on her completely)--though, honestly, I'm still not sure I understood your explanation. Beyond you not thinking it worked, I mean.
To give a character context, yes, to explain choices she's making or how she came to be who/where she is. Which I think they did pretty well, since it sets up clear reasons why she was in despair, what she wants as an escape from despair, how she came to be where she is, why she takes her role so seriously--and why it's such a problem to have found out more about her savior.
It sounds like you were expecting more of a contrast in who she was and who she is currently, or to perhaps change how we see her more than you felt it did (whereas I think it turned me around on her completely)--though, honestly, I'm still not sure I understood your explanation. Beyond you not thinking it worked, I mean.
Ya, it's hard to explain something on a subjective level. Any attempt will just be a different telling of the same explanation.
It's similar to when I tried to explain how I felt about the supporting cast in the game. The characters have backstories, but after revealing it the story or character didn't really change much other than that it will be a focus point at some point, if any.
If I were to dissect the entire 10-od minutes or so, we see her rely on her mother while being abused, rely on her mother while being neglected, rely on her host, and then in the end she will rely on the villainess. With the amount of details that has been presented, nothing noteworthy happened that couldn't be done in a flashback rather than a half-episode animation. The conclusion of her whole backstory is that nothing changed, which defeats the purpose of a lengthy backstory.
Like I said, it's totally subjective and since we both feel differently about it, it's hard to exchange the sentiment. We have different expectations on what to witness or how we consume the entertainment. Maybe in a month or 2-3 we'll be watching another Anime and you come across one scene similar to what I experience now and you'll go "oh, I think I understand".
Another week, another reminder that our antagonists are way more interesting than our protagonists. Not that they are particularly better written (though to some degree they must be), but they at least have personalities and motivations. Our heroes, on the other hand, mostly stand about agape that there are bad things in the world and are predominantly without goals or personal desires.
Which, in all honesty, wouldn't be all that bad, if they were sort of goodie-goodie fight evil, every episode. But they don't even really do that.
Still, it was better than last week's episode, and I thought Ruka and Momo stepped up their respective games just enough to offset how dissatisfying Upbeat Roommate is.
Miyako's still great. I'm even more interested to see what the baddies are going to do next, now that the...Little Girl Bad Guy has revealed that she's, like, a living inner flower thingy or whatever she is. And I continue to love the tension they're ratcheting up within Niina as she struggles with her adoration of and newfound disillusionment with Big Sister.
What in the--is that a plot I see? And...and an explanation of what the hell is going on?!
All things being relative, this was a great episode. A great episode that kind of makes me wonder what the hell we were doing spending our time watching Ruka and Hiori (I remembered her name!) stumble around like buffoons. I mean...I understand, knowing what I know now, why they chose to do it this way, but they really mucked things up in execution.
Why is that? Well, because Momo and Big Sister being partners is the central part of the story, at the moment, and the other girls have just been faffing around with periphery details for the last 8 episodes. We should have been following Momo's attempt to figure out why things weren't making sense to her much more prominently, with Miyako as her main support, giving us three simultaneous, interconnected avenues of storytelling: Momo, Niina, and Ruka(/Hiori).
...but, be that as it may, here we are, and now we know we're dealing with time travel, of sorts, and--as is always the case--time travel makes everything better. (Or perhaps it really is going all meta-narrative and they're set inside a video game, as Momo suggests. Who knows.)
I really enjoyed the Momo stuff, honestly, and how the size of her sword at the start of Ep 1 being so much larger than we'd seen it be in her work with Ruka and Hiori was more than just a throwaway detail. Heck, I even like how the Ep 1 fight had Momo in a tracksuit for the incredibly hacky reason of hiding her full-on magical girl outfit so that we wouldn't think there was anything off about the outfit we'd seen her in up to this point. (And, while we're on it, I kind of love her full-on magical girl outfit. Not as much as I love Big Sister's and Ruka's, but it looks pretty great.)
My only real question, at this point, is what's up with the different colored rings? They know that they're different colors, right? They must. So...did Big Sister and Momo switch? Did they just get different rings, this time? I thought blue was good and orange was bad, but...Momo had an orange one, in the previous loop, so...whazzup wit dat?
seriously, episode 9 is not when a modern anime should be explaining what's going on.
Even if you remembered that one line from the game about what would happen if the Genshu won, they spent way to much time world and character building.
I don't know that there's anything to say, this week, that hasn't been said every other week. Bad Guys are interesting, Good Guys are way less interesting (except Miyako, who is great), not really sure (in terms of specifics) what the heck is going on--blah blah blah.
BUT...I did stick around for the ED, so I know they changed the last couple of seconds to show Upbeat Roommate reading what I assume is a note from the baddies that they've captured Ruka.
...after she very contrivedly had to run to the craft store for teamwork bracelet beads.
This sounds like it's got a lot of interesting concepts but not very organized in terms of understanding, from my brief glance at the comments. Another I'm hesitant on trying out of seeming to be a bit too much. Then again I don't tend to really watch anime like this sort lol
I feel we dodged a bullet with this one it seems...
At the time of watching, i didn't even realise it was supposed to be 24 episodes, that would of crushed my soul, tolerating 12 episodes to see not a end credits but 12 more episodes!
...but, like, Full Dive is still going to come out, right?
Also, I cannot believe this show doesn't have audience enough to be worth printing on BluRay. Not because I think it's particularly good but because it's genuinely better than other shows I've watched that, somehow, got sequels.
I say this about every show, but the girls need to start making out. To save the franchise, I mean.
I will be angry if i am not tagged in such a episode, i would watch it with 0 context of what is happening, girls making out is my sort of thing... and i don't care how broken as a person i might sound!
