At the time this article is posting, I’ll almost certainly be in some sort of half-conscious fugue state, foaming and gnashing my teeth as I fight through yet another mediocre anime premiere. Fortunately, from whatever point in the past I’m actually writing this, I still have enough sanity left to break down the final embers of the summer season. With given already concluded, we’ve only got two shows to cover this time, but let’s try and make the most of them. For the very last time, it’s the Summer 2019 Week in Review!
I made it all the way through the end of Granbelm’s finale, which is pretty much all I can say for it. Suishou remained a boring, dramatically inert antagonist to the end, and the fact that we spent a full quarter of the show fighting her feels like a terrible waste. Secrets were kept far too long for any of their answers to feel satisfying; Shingetsu opening this episode by shouting “what do you want” at Magiaconatus felt emblematic of most of the show’s dramatic problems, where “mystery” is valued over any sort of emotional grounding for conflicts. And unlike earlier battles, there wasn’t even any real tactical grounding or coherent dramatic escalation here – just a bunch of beam spam until Shingetsu won.
Granbelm’s last act has felt simultaneously repetitive and totally aimless, asking us to care about the show’s least developed and least compelling ideas – Suishou, the fundamental nature of magic, and the true aims of Magiaconatus. The show’s strongest emotional material was always the conversations between Shingetsu and Mangetsu, but ultimately, Shingetsu’s very human anxieties turned out to be an arbitrary magical conceit, and were resolved through the dismissive “I guess I really shouldn’t exist after all.” There were a lot of fun individual episodes, and a version of this show that made better use of its cast could have been truly great, but Granbelm on the whole feels less than the sum of its parts. In the end, I’m not sure exactly what story this team wanted to tell.
Carole & Tuesday finally paused to catch its breath this week, after about a half-dozen straight episodes that all numbered among the show’s finest. This episode was pretty much entirely dedicated to setting up the series for its grand finale, which it accomplished well enough, even if that made for a less than thrilling immediate experience. There were still plenty of nice individual moments between all the montages and discussions of the future, fortunately; I particularly liked the roles Kyle played in this episode, both in his clear explanation of how policing art creates a much larger chilling effect, and in his frank rebuke of Spencer’s naivete. Angela’s fatigue here also felt completely earned and painful to witness; she’s obviously learned that the “love” of fans is not just highly conditional, but also possessive in a way that can’t be equated to genuine love. Given her own hard-earned skepticism, Tao serves as a very natural partner for her – he makes no efforts to hide his pragmatism, and has already “solved” her voice at this point, but still he returns to stand beside her. They’re a weird couple, but I wish them all the best.
