That was...actually, I'm not completely sure what that was.
A/N: Part of Organization Anti-Social Geniuses' Fall Evaluation
It's really easy to compare this to
No. 6, another Bones anime that aired last summer. It has government conspiracies, a deadly disease heralded by insects, references and lines from Shakespeare, and homoeroticism (one of the main characters was dating a girl, but she's dead now, which is a green light for the fujoshis if I ever saw one). But while
No. 6's first episode had a slow setup of these themes with a particular emphasis on the government conspiracy,
Blast of Tempest has all of these things in a confusing mass of exposition. That's not to say that it wasn't interesting, but I think it's going to take me a few episodes to pin down what exactly is going on and what the plot arc of the show is.
It also differs from
No. 6 by establishing early on in the episode that magic and mages exist in this world, so there's a far less chance of a Deus ex Machina rainbow bee getting dropped on us out of nowhere. "Magic" is also the best guess that I can make at the overall conflict. There's a guy with a Shakespearian name that is trying to revive a floating eyeball in a hologram tree called Exodus to presumably take over the world, giant hordes of butterflies, people turning into metal, and a government "volunteer" who knows what is probably top secret information, to say nothing of the male leads, the marooned mage, and the murder mystery. That is a lot to put into one episode, and I hope that the entire show isn't like this. There is already plenty of plot to unpack for the entire season.
Aside from the tangle that the premise is right now, I'm really interested in our blond lead, Mahiro. I'm not sure why the episode decided to follow the perspective of the other lead, Yoshino, rather than him, because he was the only one who seemed to be getting stuff done in this episode. He's got a clear motivation--find his sister's killer--and he's flying around and stopping bullets in midair (fight choreography was great). I want to know about what he was up to in the month he went missing. On the other hand, the main thing that's been established for Yoshino is that he's a jerk. Who tells a grieving friend "That's the paradox of the human condition"? To be fair, he does stand by his dead girlfriend, so that's a plus in his favor, and Mahiro has clearly been unhinged by his sister's death, but Mahiro is still the more interesting of the two for me. I also like the marooned mage and hope that she doesn't have to stay on the island the entire time (although I understand if she has to for plot reasons).
To summarize, the characters and the visuals are selling me more on the show than the story right now, but I am interested in hearing the explanation for all this as well. I just hope that it doesn't get too caught up in trying to look cool by throwing out lines from Shakespeare backed by overdramatic music. Save it for the finale.
Images from Crunchyroll.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment