Togami’s been an unremarkable character for most of the series. I say that because this episode he really stood out, pulling a Barry Marshall and drinking what was ostensibly poison to prove his point. Even before I knew what that point was, I was hooked on his presentation there. There’s levels of differences in the body language between a sip and a chug, and this was the latter.
So the show did end up relying on the rematch, but it did it in a bit of a roundabout way that allowed for more emotional investment in the interim. Since Gou did the signups without telling any of the guys, we got a lot of footage of them trying their best in individual events. They may all have eventually lost, but they did so in the seven-game Conference Semifinals series kind of way, where one lucky bounce (or something as trivial as Rei’s goggles staying put) would have been enough to turn all of that into a win. In other words, losses providing the perfect narrative building blocks of a relay challenge the next day.
(Check out the stickied post for the full bracket.)
The complexity of the matchups continues to increase, thanks in part to Kiritisugu’s mottled moral history and in part to Dekomori’s tangled hair bolos.
(Check out the stickied post for the full bracket.)
Day 3 of the bracket sees a confrontation between two characters very comfortable flaunting their respective elite statuses. One’s a try-hard ace on the basketball court, the other’s just born lucky.
WataMote is fun to watch when it’s primarily about Tomoko self-destructing on her own. It gets less fun when she gets others wrapped up in her pathetic bluffs, especially when they believe in her. The style of humor this week wasn’t that different from normal, and the episode in general was way stronger than 6, but the subject matter straddled the barrier between funny sad and sad sad.
Though the vacuum scene was still appreciably fun
(Check out the stickied post for the full bracket.)
The first match ended in a tie, something I forgot to make a rule for. I’m going to say higher seed wins by default if that happens again. Anyway, day 2’s matchup gets a lot more comedic, featuring a somewhat oddball straight man up against a straight-up oddball.
(Check out the stickied post for the full bracket.)
In the inaugural matchup of our Charactology feature, we compare the appeal of a character who spends most of the series trying to go to space with a character who spends most of the series deader than a Hokuto no Ken villain.
There are times when we at Animetics like to slow down, get serious, and look at the finer points of what defines excellence. This, much like our seasonal anime previews, is not one of those features. There’s no objective way of determining who the best anime character actually is, and we don’t claim to be any more accurate than a series of purely random coin flips. That said, welcome to Charactology 2012, the Animetics bracketology-inspired character polling feature.
In general, this was a pretty solid buildup episode, highlighting Haru and Rin’s quietly intensifying rivalry, the comradeship of the four main characters, and a bit of Rin’s external motivation. Oh yeah, and it wasn’t actually a buildup episode. They literally powered through the race, something I was sure would take at least another episode getting to, with ruthless efficiency and great effect.
Animetics 