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p style=”text-align: left;”>Synopsis: For some time, Natsuno has suspected she is being watched. One day while she is out, someone breaks into Natsuno’s perfectly secure room and removes a single book. It happens to be the book she just purchased at Sakura’s recommendation, the winner of the full-length novel special award, Heiando’s newest author Fujimaki Hotaru’s “Keisei Love Story.”
Impression:
So, I went to Twitter yesterday, y’know, as you do, and I saw that someone I was following tried to watch this episode after abandoning the show long ago. They hated it. In fact, they said they’d like to buy up the DVD stock and burn it. Now obviously this was an ‘over dramatic’ and somewhat ridiculous comment, but it got me thinking… maybe this show isn’t as good as I thought it was…?
And then Natsuno blushed and I knew I’d been right all along.
That aside, let’s talk about episode 9… Jesus, episode 9… We’re getting awfully close to the end now aren’t we? I had previously thought that there would be more to ‘the stalker’ than their actually was (I had predicted that he was Natsuno’s father… yeah, it was nothing that dramatic) and, honestly, I’m a bit disappointed in the outcome. But, what I’m not disappointed in is the way that the arc has turned out. I’m glad Ami is finally getting some real screen time. Now I think it’s quite obvious at this point that Ami is another character from Kazuhito’s past, but what I’m interested in is her importance. If his flashbacks are anything to go by, Ami used to hang out with him in the library? Or work with him whilst he was still a… library overseer? Or she might just have been his girlfriend. I’d like to think that the latter option is the ‘correct theory’ because, you know, it would make for some great drama. That aside, I think we’ve been presented with an interesting character for what will surely probably be an interesting arc… let’s just hope it’s not as anticlimactic as some of the previous ones…
And whilst we’re still talking about the arc (and, I guess, the episode), let’s talk about ‘the manuscript’. It’s a novel manuscript right? The manuscript for a novel we may or may not have seen yet… It’s just a theory but, I think that the novel Kazuhito and Natsuno read, “Keisei Love Story”, is actually the published form of that manuscript, a manuscript that Ami probably ‘stole’ and used in an attempt to maybe, perhaps lure Kazuhito out? And I’m just saying ‘n all, but why does almost every girl in Kazuhito’s life so far seem to suspect that he’s not actually dead? Pretty much every one of them has tried to lure him out in some way… again, just saying.
But I digress, if the manuscript is Kazuhito’s own written work, one does have to wonder how he forget about it/didn’t recognize it when he was reading it. He did say that there was “something else” about the novel that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but surely it was be ridiculous to insinuate that he ‘forgot’ about his own novel? But, as I said, this is all pure conjecture, nothing more than the postulation a teenage boy in England (that would be me, just to clarify).
Let’s move on though, shall we?
The episode in general wasn’t that great, relying heavily on the cliched tropes and jokes that have been used in almost every episode so far to move the plot along. For a light novel to anime adaption you’d think that Dog and Scissors would have a much stronger plot, no? I said it once and I’ll say it again: Dog and Scissors doesn’t know what it wants to be and ultimately it can only suffer for it. I like Dog and Scissors because, for some reason that’s beyond my own understanding, the humor presented it ‘my kind of humor’. But when said humor is overused and overplayed, does it take away from the show? The answer is yes, it does. I don’t mind the recurrence of old jokes, jibes and tropes, as long as there’s new ‘material’ to devour in the process. Now I’m just a teenage boy writing blog posts about anime, but I know for a fact that weaving comedy in with your writing is hard and for some people it comes easier than others. This show, or this shows writer, knows what he’s doing comedy wise, but he doesn’t know how to space it. A flat chest joke more than once every episode? At what point does it become old?
But let’s not dwell on the negatives for too long (although for a site named ‘Angry Anime Bitches’ you’d think that this entire post would be a rant…), Dog and Scissors has begun (perhaps) it’s final story arc… final ‘important’ story arc… probably. Episode 9 in general wasn’t ‘the best’, but it was nothing fans of the show wouldn’t enjoy. It’s everything that we’ve come to love from the show wrapped up into yet another episode, and whilst I think it’s definitely time to move on and make better jokes, I do however still see the appeal of the odd ‘flat chest’ jokes here and there… that said, you’d think that Kazuhito would eventually learn not to keep making said jokes in Natsuno’s presence…