Someone should really do something about them.
Impressions:
The most cohesive episode, but also the weakest. It’s just a telling of KAngel’s backstory, and it’s the same tired abuse backstory as ever, and one that has only become more tedious with all the edgelord cheat power things that use it, complete with cackling psychopathic 12 year olds. Literally everybody but her kindly elderly relative physically and emotional abuses her for absolutely no reason until she/her fellow abusee snaps. Yeah, it’s sad and tragic, but it’s also completely over the top, so it’s not very realistic or empathetic on anything more than the most superficial level. Which undercuts the edgelord point it slowly weaves its way towards, that streamers are lying and fabricating a world. Both tragic and happy worlds here are exaggerated to the extreme and entirely unrealistic, so neither have much grounding.
There’s more to building a tragic character than saying “they had abusive parents,” and the answer isn’t doubling down with “they also had abusive classmates.” It’s the same as when shows blast the screen with bloom and cherry petals to communicate happy emotion. Yes, you can evoke that emotion, because we are wired to see suffering person and feel bad, but it’s completely superficial when it’s not a person, and it’s not for any particular reason. Again, it’s nice to see any show that is actually aware of the darker sides of a subculture that is usually pure veneration, but this is being done with the deftness of a sledgehammer and no narrative or actual characters. God help me, I want to compare it to early episodes of Wonder Egg, and that’s just making me mad.
Next Episode:
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