The deer, or the yankee?
Impressions:
I think expectations undermined this quite a bit. Certainly the promos did. A lot of the better sight gags were shown in the promos already, and all that the episode added was having a girl scream an overreaction to them, or long explanations that a deer/deer girl is SO TOTALLY CRAZY AND NONSENSICAL. They definitely played up the meme-y angle too, by constantly having people chant “deer” in the background, and that joke had already been ground into the dust by both the promos and the hojillion fan/tribute videos spewed out after the promos went viral. I think I would’ve been a lot more receptive to the humor had I been caught off guard by the absurd stuff, or at least if there was a bit more that wasn’t in the promos.
I guess it’s mostly fine, if a little disappointing that it’s just a very modern anime comedy. I think I mentioned elsewhere, but in the recent infrastructure/internet collapse in the PNW during the winter, I curled up and rewatched the entirety of Pani Poni Dash for lack of anything better to do, so the memory of an absurdist comedy that’s capable of running multiple plotlines in parallel… or even just having a single one at all, is still fairly fresh in my mind. This lacks even that basic structure, being just a series of short vignettes consisting mainly of loud overreactions. There might have been some decent slapstick, but there wasn’t much that I hadn’t seen months ago in the promos, so it’s hard to laugh at them. I guess we’ll see if the next episode brings anything more or not.
Next Episode:
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