Is it really a manic pixie girl without obnoxious pastel backgrounds?
Impressions:
Like Dandadan, I did make it to the end of the first season of this, but I was pretty unhappy with it. A few early episodes were fairly strong, but each new character it introduced undermined its own premise and character development. Any time it seemed to have a big character moment or someone had an epiphany in their relationship, within 2-3 episodes it would be revealed that the claims made before were never true. Some things were inexplicable, like the manic pixie girl being the only thing that brought joy to his life followed by flashbacks and hanging out with his old friends also doing that as well. Other things were significantly more offputting, especially virtually everything involving the vampire coven in the second half, in case anybody forgot that there was an entire arc about how you should be giving your violent stalker exes another chance because that just shows how much they’re committed to a relationship. What are you, a coward?
This is all extra relevant to this episode because after a three year gap between seasons, this is one of those soft recap episodes where instead of jumping right back into the story and anything happening, everybody stands around and reiterates the current situation to make sure that everybody is on the same page. And boy, do I love people standing around yapping at each other for no actual point. They wander around, wondering out loud about their feelings and how people look for romance, and then just the same biting as usual. We are teenagers (not really) with such big teenage feelings. Boy are our feelings big. We have such feelings. If there ever was romance, there’s certainly much less of it by putting in a microscope and announcing how much romance there is.
