07.21
More poses than JoJo's
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Yeah….I know… I’m late. Fucking Clusterfuck taken up all my free time, I’m tellin ya. Whelp, back to Crowds.
Last time on Crowds…nothing happened (sur-prise, sur-priiiiiiiiise). This time on Crowds… Something happened!…but not much.
Give death a chance!
Introducing our new villain, Rizumu Suzuki, a medical student who also received the CROWDS note from presumably Berg-Katze (don’t rule out Gelsadra just yet) but didn’t use it fearing its awesome potential if abused. But then Rui proceeded to do so for the benefit of humanity, and that really ticked Suzuki off because hairless apes aren’t supposed to have that power and now must be destroyed to make room for homo superior or some other nonsense. To that end he formed VAPE, the pseudo-revival of the Neo-One Hundred out to save the world through mass terrorism via The Red Crowds. The funny thing about this is I just watched “Kingsman: The Secret Service” a couple days ago and this really resembles the plan of Valentine right down to the sinister usage of cell phones. The one difference is Suzuki isn’t nearly as cool as Samuel L. Jackson. All he’s got is a stupid face mask that makes him look like Kaneki from Tokyo Ghoul albeit with red hair. One must wonder if the delay Crowds insight had from last year was meant to cover for the perceived allusions to that other show…because it didn’t work.
Hello Sailor!
MEANWHILE IN STUPIDVILLE…. Because Sugane’s too busy trying avoid openly coming out of the closet, newbie Tsubasa has to get a new mentor…The Creature! *shudder* The trio of The Creature, Tsubasa, and “Gergergergergerusadra!” hop a bullet train and head for Tokyo as a publicity event at a shoping mall has been scheduled to welcome the latest Gatchaman. The one problem is Tsubasa still hasn’t figured out the Bird Go! thing and makes an utter fool of herself on national television. To make matters worse, the Red Crowds proceed to show up and wreck all sorts of shit. Unable to transform, Tsubasa only succeeds in breaking her grandma’s leg. Way to go Genius. But that’s ok! She’s going to get a strict dressing down from Creature-Chan right?
…goddammit Hajime.
This is a bit of an improvement on episode 1 and I attribute that to the mall fight, its actually pretty well done for the most part and shows clearly how crap Tsubasa is as a Gatchaman. Presumably she’ll finally figure out how to transform over the course of the series and I suspect that will be providing most of the dramatic drive. As for Suzuki…well…he’s ok. I’d say he’s more interesting as a villain than Katze because he’s cool and calculating where as Katze was basically just an escapee from Time Bokan at times. Whether or not he gets any better as a character though remains to be seen though. Overall, compared to around this time last season when it was the sour milk episode, its a modest improvement.
OF COURSHE!
But that mask still looks stupid. 6/10.