Maybe the expositions are catching up to me a little. Frankly, as much as I do enjoy this show, episodes 9 and 10 weren’t very enjoyable. But let’s take a step back to an episode that was enjoyable.
Episode 8 was still great. Most of the story was addressing what happened in the time skip (which to me seems like would be more interesting than anything in this Nanse arc) between Rikka (Kuro’s cousin), Kuro, and Kotoko. Kotoko was unbelievably cute like usual, both when explaining the flashback and in the flashback as well.
My favourite scene this episode, and maybe the funniest moment of the whole show, was when Kuro thought of Rikka then Kotoko as his wife. Watching Kuro being disgusted at the thought of Kotoko, along with her obsessive behaviour was absolutely hilarious.
The whole scene after the flashback, when Kotoko talked to Saki, was also fun to watch. Watching Kotoko making it as though her relationship with Rikka was great was also funny. Although it was again fairly repetitive, episode 8 was great in the same ways the whole has been on its highs.
But what I started to see in episodes 9 and 10 was that it was starting to drag a lot. I keep repeating on how I was perfectly fine with the exposition style of this anime because of how much I love the dynamics between the characters. But these two episodes, this was completely thrown out of the window. First, Kuro was fighting the Nanse the whole time. The fight did not serve any sort of excitement what-so-ever due to the lackluster fight sequence (I was able to handle it last time because of his “lack of knowledge in martial arts but watching something like this for 40 minutes is different from 2 minutes.) We cut to him fighting sometimes and I think it’s supposed to reflect how much progress that they made towards making Nanase weaker but this doesn’t do too much. Saki is sitting on the front of the car and occasionally adds reactions time to time. She makes the whole situation slightly more natural but that’s about it. Kotoko does most of the talking in these two episodes as she is sitting down with her laptop. Naturally, with this setting, the show wasn’t able to capitalize on the character interactions that made the show fun (other than Saki saying “really?” “this kid is a genius” etc.) Unsurprisingly, this isn’t too fun to watch.
Unlike past episodes, where we would see little bits of personality while they were speaking – either through monologue, body language or little cutscenes – which made the character interactions so enjoyable. But in these two episodes, none of this felt like it was there. Of course, there is the fact that the characters were all separated, and with all this lacking her monologue doesn’t get any interesting,
Although it was reassuring to see that they used at least somewhat more unique ideas that’s not just “fake reports”, the way that the stories were explained was a problem. When Kotoko was explaining the story, the background was set around a Net like atmosphere which, although at first interesting, gets boring when it repeats for 2 episodes.
Because of this extremely lackluster setting and the abundance of exposition, the two episodes felt like a picture book. So like what I would do when reading any boring book, I skipped through after I had a grasp of the story. The whole experience for me was just clicking the right arrow multiple times to skip through while watching the show.
I really hope that the show doesn’t have 2 more episodes of theories before ending…
Convoluted Situation 