March 01, 2014

Saturday Morning Cakefight

Saturday mornings...
In my youth this meant sitting down with grotesquely unhealthy cereal and watching Saturday morning cartoons, which was the programming block for kids back in the days when there were only 3 TV networks. These were almost always billed as exciting adventure shows. However, due to a malevolent confluence of progressive hysteria, lawyers and network departments of standards and practices, theses shows were almost uniformly a profound disappointment. While kids everywhere else in the world got to watch various iterations of Grendaizer, we poor American children were being tormented by The Funky Phantom, Devlin and Jabberjaw.

This morning, I decided to have revenge upon the programing directors who ruined my childhood. I got up, pulled a Go-Cup of Fruit Loops out of the hurricane box, sat down in front of the computer and went to Crunchyroll which airs new episodes of Log Horizon at 07:30 on Saturdays. I just thought it would be amusing to go through those motions of yesteryear but actually see something really good.

Just like they had with Clue Club, the gum-numbing dregs of the Fruit Loops served to exquisitely accentuate the disappointment.

Heretofore, every single episode, of Log Horizon has not only been good, its been better than the last. This episode continues the shows habit of surprising its audience by abruptly reversing that self improvement trend.


No...no actually, this was pretty much the exact opposite of that.

In fairness, part of the problem here is that previous episodes have set a rather high bar.

In the last episode, the plot had taken yet another intriguing turn. With only four episodes to go, many of us were looking forward to find out just what had gone down in Minami....

....so naturally, we got middle school soap opera and cake.

Lots of cake!.


J. Greely NAILED it!


What?
What happened?



Now, I'm not really likening this episode to...the execrable squalor that was The Funky Phantom...



"Good God I should hope not!"

This story wasn't actually bad, mind you. It was even kind of cute.

However, it was just a complete non-sequitur of an episode that seemed to belong in some other show.

There are only three episodes left, so I'm wondering (now with some trepidation) about  how they're going to wrap this generally excellent series up.

I'll be watching next weeks installment with a lot of interest.
...but without the Fruit Loops.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Now now, the Funky Phantom wasn't bad....

... it was execrable.

Posted by: Mauser at Sat Mar 1 21:19:06 2014 (TJ7ih)

2

Some people noted that the whole cake story seems to be an apology for not doing more with Akatsuki during the light novels. But apparently there's also a faction who thinks it's wildly funny. Um. Anyway, they left out the stupidest part, which is a restaurant staff thinking that Shiroe is a pedophile and doing nothing about it except leaving offensive messages in the decoration of the cakes. (What??)

Having people think Shiroe is a suspicious character can be done better, and I don't know why it wasn't. I guess because the writer likes Shiroe and can't bring himself to write plausibly suspicious gamers.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Tue Mar 4 15:01:59 2014 (nh8FR)

3 Hmm.
It was a cute enough episode
One of the things that I'd LIKED about the show is the perfectly reasonable suspicion of Shiroe.

The ensemble cast is actually working much better than these things usually do, in part because the cast is pretty intelligent.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Mar 4 18:59:23 2014 (DnAJl)

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