I can’t wait for the post-test paperwork.
Impressions:
Welp, Witch Hat. I just spent a week dragging you in posts about other shows for spending most of your second episode on setup for test certification, which itself is a pre-test for the real testing. So what’s the test going to be? No reason it needs to be terrible. We could go on an adventure. Slay a dragon. Tongue a cat’s ass. …We’re climbing to the top of a rock. Great. Fantastic. Brilliant. Thanks, Baby Snape. And for the ninth speech in the last week about how only God’s chosen, as determined by you, are allowed to use magic, fourth from this show alone. At least it won’t be distracted by a third of the episode spent on the opposite side of the world, discussing the geopolitical situation or how the test is actually super testy. ………God damn it.
At its core, it’s the same failing that so damn many anime have. I want to see adversity. I want to see them actually fail, pick themselves up, and try again. There’s grace in failure. Actual failure. But the approach they take is to overdramatize the absolute hell out of the slightest adversity and treat that as if they had failed when no, it was just that they didn’t succeed immediately. But then they say “I’m gonna do my best,” and bother to attempt something… anything… and the first thing they try works immediately. Perfectly. Without a hitch. There’s no accomplishment there. They didn’t struggle. They didn’t grow. They didn’t learn anything. They had a flashback and a lot of emotion about getting up the gumption to even try in the first place. To not give up the second a challenge appeared. Which is going to immediately be forgotten by next week when they can declare that they’ll Do Their Best™ again, to the awe of everybody. Harsher than this show in particular deserves probably, but it continues to feel like the lowest bar for character development in writing which shows keep being unable to clear.
