Can’t you just sell drugs?
Impressions:
Despite there only being three shows today, I already feel far more exhausted than yesterday’s eight. All three shows were so slow and barely animated. It’s extremely unstimulating and tiring just to concentrate. Here is the standard mah-jong criminal show with all the standard mah-jong babble that maybe it makes sense, maybe it doesn’t, but I honestly could not care less. And I say that as somebody who once knew the broad-strokes bidding rules for Bridge. Why is this dude even so shocked that he’s being hustled by a kid that they invited to gamble in high stakes games in the first place? Is this not the most obvious outcome? Even before the long explanation of cheating and counter-cheating.
Then we get to his origin story with some particularly bizarre criminals, who shanghai him, drag him past their human trafficking and rape den, to have their own game of mah-jong, which they will also be openly cheating in. What ever happened with just mugging a dude or racketeering? You’re going to grab him, show off all your criminal activities, and then demand he play a fixed game of mah-jong as your ‘legal’ pretext for shaking him down? Seems like a lot of particularly weird trouble to go through for harassing some random teenager who lives by himself. But since the pacing here is also terrible, this is only the first half (hopefully) of his origin story, so we have to gasp and be shocked constantly before freeze frame ending on… another gasp.
