This sentence is a general indicator of my reaction towards the episode as a whole. Some things happened here and there, but the overall impression that I got is that The Animation Studio Everyone is Talking About is totally on the ball this week. The majority of the other blogs totally disagree with me, and even their respective comments are totally divided as well. To not sound too divisive on the subject, I assure that my general indicator was felt by the majority of viewers, so that my taste in anime is very agreeable.

Diving into the meat of the show, the episode starts off like this. Last episode we were left with the main character and the supporting cast having just wrapped up minor event, but this week opens with just the main character in a bizarre situation that seems to lack context, but sooner or later, you know shit is about to go down.

Oh man! I can’t believe shit just went down! The big bad didn’t really show up in full, but there’s enough obstacles in the way of the main character that he can’t really achieve the goals that he set from the first episode. Another complication arises when the supporting characters are affected as well, and they have no choice but to deal with it with mister main character. At first, the main character seems to lack empathy about the situation. All he cares about is his goal, but that attitude is obfuscated by the fact that shit clearly went down, and his aloofness makes him clearly similar to all the other ordinary high school students in other anime. Why can’t he be anything other than an ordinary high school student? Ordinary High School Student main characters are so cliche.

Anyways, I’ve already used the word cliche once in this post (and now twice as of the end of this sentence), and the episode is barely 10 minutes in. To distract the reader, let’s put in some more screenshots!

New details are added into the story, and provide just enough material to speculate about the show. I could very well spend the entire post on how this particular element is symbolic of the main character’s development, and that he’s anything but a typical teenage boy. Based on that brilliant author whose books are now public domain, the connection between that boy and the downfall of the character in that brilliant author’s book is no accident. Shit just went down, but it’s only going to get a lot worse from here on out. That boy is in a lot of trouble.

This paragraph doesn’t have anything to do with the screenshot above, but due to the way the episode develops towards its climax, there isn’t really any screenshot I could have used that fits, because I already used the most appropriate one in the beginning of the post. So instead, I’ll just talk about how the characters have finally banded together and formulated a plan on how to overcome the obstacle. The bad guy finally shows up, but only for a very short time, because he’s brooding and evil, and the more we see of him, the less we like him as a character. This other blog already doesn’t like him, and I can see why.

The climax of the episode was really well done. The action moves pretty quickly from one revelation to another, from one reaction to another, and all that shit that went down in the first place is on pace to being resolved. However, there are a few loose threads that were introduced when the new details were added that I can’t really explain without pulling something out of my ass, so I’ll leave it to future episodes to explain it for me.

By this point, it’s 3:40am, and I needed to have this post out yesterday, because I didn’t post anything all of this week, and I need to look like I’m somewhat active so that Anime Nano doesn’t pull me from their database. This post is approaching 1,000 words, but I still haven’t wrapped up the episode or put my final thoughts, so I’ll shortcut it by filling out the rest of my post with screenshots throughout the episode.

Final Thoughts: by reserving this section for final thoughts, I can finally write in my own voice, as my writing style is more fit for subjective interpretations than pseudo-intellectual analysis that comes off as objective and academic as a result. I could sound smart if I wanted to, but why would I want to do that? I could very well go on and on about how much I love the main character after this episode. He really turned the corner on me, and I can’t wait for him to continue being awesome. As for the story, the episode really seemed to fit in with the way the show is pacing. Considering that it’s an adaptation from the light novel, I can see that the show is on pace to cover the first two volumes, one for each cour.

I have enough knowledge about the anime industry to say that the writers really planned out this episode well within the context of the rest of the series. I’m not caught up with the untranslated editions of the novel, so I can’t make any comment about how the characters are supposed to turn out, but I can say with confidence that the anime does its job as an adaptation, transferring the story into another medium with a reasonable amount of success. The original light novel’s author really comes out in the dialogue, particularly because the main character’s numerous internal monologues come straight from the prose. Either way, the story-lover in me was treated to something really nice and juicy this week, and I can’t wait to write the post for next week’s episode.