06.28
*takes a shot*
I’m noticing on other blogs that this is the point where they’re jumping ship. Frankly, I can’t blame them one bit.
This second arc is really setting off an example of what happens when a so bad it’s good show just becomes bad. I remember watching shows like Secret Life of the American Teenager and Valvrave purely on the basis that they were funny to laugh at. But then, the writers had the idea that their show would suck less if they cut out the unintentionally funny bits. While that could make a series objectively better, it cuts out what made the show interesting to begin with, especially when the writing at large hasn’t improved. That predicament mirrors the issue here, where a lack of Randian diatribes turns a hilariously bad show into just a bad show.
On the surface, it might be easy to think that Mahouka would actually improve without the pseudo-political dogma. However, that void has been filled with the same old vices the show has created for itself like magic technobabble and over-reliance on Tatsuya’s godliness. It all just makes for a show that’s too procedural, with a writer that seems too blind to realize what’s going on. This arc is supposed to encompass a couple books, right? And from what I heard, the adaptation cuts out some of the exposition going throughout the story? So how could someone go through volume after volume of this? Maybe I should auto-translate my fanfiction and email it to Dengeki Bunko in the hopes I’ll get published, because that sounds just as plausible as this show ever seeing the light of day.
I know that I haven’t talked about the actual episode at hand yet and more at the series so far, but it keeps getting harder to talk about the show when it just shills more of the same material it delivers last week and the week before. I guess that one point in this episode worth discussing involves the theme of being monitored. The characters keep talking about how the tournament committee is looking through their CADs, which could be the reason why their armory might be faulty during matches. And while I would love for this to be a message on how over-inspecting our personal effects is detrimental to society, it just leads to talking about how we should let the right people (i.e. Tatsuya) to monitor our stuff instead of stuffy adults.
But that’s only a hint rather than an actual question the show considers, which makes theorizing this series all the more aggravating given its complete blindness to other paths than the one it has chosen for itself. This isn’t to say this show is challenging. To say Mahouka challenges the mind is like saying twenty minutes of white noise makes for a good conversation piece. Maybe I’m only seeing the show with a skin-deep perspective, but low tide is starting to set in for this series. If nothing happens in the next few weeks, consider this show dropped.