Why is Vigne so perfect?
Impression
An entire episode dedicated to Vigne. Is this what heaven is like? The only that ruined what was an otherwise perfect episode was the increasingly cringeworthy subs. I hate to bring this up every week, but I really feel like they’re impossible to ignore because they’re just so bad and so wrong. Yet again, I was reminded today that not all HorribleSubs are equal. Some are more equal (i.e. horrible) than others. And I’m sorry to say that the ones for Gabriel DropOut are amongst the worst that I’ve seen. It’s ‘thank you for the food’, not ‘through the dark lord, amen’. It’s ‘where are you throwing that’, not ‘throw a homer’. It’s ‘I got careless’, not ‘complacency kills the demon’. It’s ‘I want to give her strength’, not ‘I want to dispel her darkness’. You might as well translate it as ‘I want to protect her smile’. The one that made me uncomfortable the most was how they did the bear pun that Raphi made where ‘akuma’ became ‘a-kuma’, but admittedly it was in need of some sort of translation and I don’t know whether I could have done any better myself. So I’ll reserve judgment on that. Part of me was wondering whether I should start waiting for fansubs instead of putting myself through the experience of being triggered once every few minutes. I know there are people putting out releases for this very reason. Surely it’s even harder for CR to come up with a vaguely related pun instead of properly and literally translating it? There should be a distinction between Japanese puns that need to be adapted into English somehow, and just changing the text at the expense of those who can’t tell otherwise. This sort of poor effort is a disservice to both the episode and Vigne herself.
Okay. I’ve gotten that out of the way now. I thought the episode itself was fantastic. We’ve never had so much Vigne all at once before, and after last week’s relative Vigne drought it was nice to see the cutest and best angel get lots of screen time again. I mean, demon. Vigne’s lifestyle is everything I want my lifestyle to be like. I want to be as fulfilled as Vigne. That first scene with her day off was basically my ideal day. Except my free time ends up being spent more like Gab spends hers, or I end up collapsing after getting home (after telling myself I’m just taking a short nap of an undefined length) and waking up at 11pm and realising my entire evening is gone and that I haven’t eaten yet. Oh, but there’s one thing I can relate to her about. Her sheep-counting. I thought only I did that! When I count sheep at night and try to get to sleep, my brain doesn’t stop making the sheep do strange things. They never pile up at the fence like Vigne’s do, but often they jump over at different speeds and different heights, so a queue can build up. It’s always an orderly queue though. Some sheep are woolly. Others were recently sheared. Sometimes a sheep struggles to climb over and cutely falls over the other side after barely making it. Or the fence is too tall for a loli sheep to jump over and so it has to find a gap further down the fencing in order to make it through. D-does this happen to anyone else? N-no?
Other than Vigne’s sheep-counting habits, my favourite moments all involved Vigne trying to act as badly as Satania does in an attempt to get paid more. That final high-five was brilliant, especially as she doesn’t normally have as much to do with Satania as she does with Raphi or her wife Gab. I don’t know how she does it, but she’s at least five times as cuter than Satania when she tries to do ‘demonic’ things. With Satania I mostly want to laugh, but with Vigne I’m torn between laughing and squirming to myself over how cute and perfect she is.
