Metallic Rouge, episode 4

Wow, that was a mess. It’s really weird to read an episode review and find praise for all the things I thought were terrible about the story. Usually I think Tenka Seiha’s takes are too negative, but this week he nailed it.

Verdict: bored now.

(picture is completely unrelated, to take the bad taste out of my mouth)

Frieren, episode 21

Finally! This was better than last week’s episode, despite there still being no reason to care about most of the mages. It helped that they let us see Flamme again and tied her to the ancient elf that popped up out of nowhere last week. Now, if they can manage not to drag out the next round of the tournament…

Verdict: a bad run of Frieren episodes is still better than 90% of what’s out there.

Molesting Magical Girls, episode 5

There are innocent ways to play house and play doctor. Our New Emotionless Loli, however, has knowledge beyond her years and kinks to match. If you thought forum commenters were squicked out before, this episode should send them into orbit as she shows off her fully-nude transformation, mind-controls two of Our Gullible Magical Girls into violating the third, then takes a firm hand with Our Sick Villainess, for her own good and ours.

Verdict: …and yet this is actually a character-driven story that introduces a new teammate and shows her life being improved by making friends.

(this is more wholesome than Alice’s idea of a lady doctor…)

Pon-Pon-Q, episode 5

The big news this week is not that Girl#5 joins the gang, but that the other girls wear different clothes. This is sufficiently rare in anime that it deserves a callout, even though the results are less revealing. Sadly, while the eyecatch shows them switching costumes, there’s no magical-girl nude transformation scene.

It’s not like they just wear different outfits every day like normal people, though; there has to be a reason, and this week’s reason is having a barbecue picnic (while promising a future swimsuit episode).

Verdict: despite Our New Goth Girl’s obsession with a revenge match, this is an actual cute-girls-doing-cute-things episode, with no mahjong content. This also means no man-face “jokes”, which is a real bonus. Next week: more costume changes.

(…but not this sort of costume change)

Been There, Done That

AKA the second-best Groundhog Day episode back when everyone was doing that, AKA Xena season 3 episode 2. The series has rotated back to being on Prime again, so I had to watch it, to see if it still held up. The answer is… mixed. The episode is still funny, but the video was horribly over-compressed, which made it barely watchable; my HD streams were fine, which means that Amazon doesn’t have a decent SD source for the show.

Also, I remember Gabrielle being a lot cuter when I originally watched this show. Still young, healthy, and girl-shaped, so I’m guessing my memory merged her with other blonde actresses of the Nineties. After all, I haven’t seen any of this stuff in nearly 30 years.

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