Slap some blood on it. That’ll be horror-ish.
Impressions:
We start out with some kid undressing, then right to the OP that jumps straight to multiple pans over the main girl being topless. Not so much horror or mystery here as blatant fanservice. Which would be toned down a bit in the actual episode, at least in the visuals. Just a little bit though. And definitely not in the script, because both characters can’t help but remark on her boobs, butt, bra, or status of her virginity every third line or so. Which is actually preferable to the long explanation of the mystery of the week. …It’s a cursed book that makes you young, but kills you. That’s it. That’s the mystery. With Mystery-theme spooky chimes at full blast. This somehow takes about five paragraphs to explain because first we need to delve into the history, then the exact way the curse is cast three or four times, then how to undo it. All said and done, we’ve spent at least six or seven minutes just on explaining the mechanics, and man, am I exhausted of listening to people reciting tutorials this season.
Its attempt to tie this to the characters is that she wanted to be young because that’s when people said she was talented. But all this is presented after the fact, and is resolved with “Maybe you should stop being so sad.” Oh, well, okay then. Fair enough. Depression and existential angst conquered. It’s hardly a developed or fulfilling character arc, and the whole bit where she uses ‘quickly’ shifting from one form to the next to get away is just plain bizarre, both because it requires reciting an entire four line poem on the fly, and because I have no idea how one form or the other helps her just… run past the dude, twice. At the very least, you’d think it’d be something you could start reacting to somewhere around the second stanza.
