Apologies for the delay, everyone! Karandi has been feeling under the weather and has not been able to provide her thoughts for the last week. As such, we are giving you two helpings of VISUALIST this week with our thoughts on both last week’s and this week’s episode. Share your thoughts and wish Karandi well!
Kapodaco (Episode 21)
I think for the rest of this season, I’m going to keep my thoughts on each episode rather short. Unless something really substantial happens, I see little need to go over things that are essentially retreading old topics and going through the motions of a story that’s wearing its purpose thin. Karandi and I have both been very harsh with this season and anything more would be kicking it while it’s down, I think. For that, I’ll just speak at varying lengths about things that I found noteworthy.
- Gentle actually has some oomph to him via his quirk. Even so, he’s still hard to take seriously, if only for the bouncy presentation. The end foreshadows La Brava’s quirk being akin to a doomsday device, so that will be interesting to see come next episode.
- This episode in particular was very heavy on both the invigorating “Never give up!!!” mood and the silly, “This doesn’t seem all that dangerous” side to Gentle’s antics. Not sure I believe it did a particularly good job at either, but together, it felt a little self-indulgent. The airborne fight took a little longer than it should have (elongated by random flashbacks to scenes that the audience never saw) while Gentle’s nonsense plan could’ve been wrapped up in “I just wanna be famous, lol.” A bit too willing to pad things out, which, again, has been an issue quite often in this season.
- This is the second episode in a row where All Might has done basically nothing but stand in the background and serve as an observant cheerleader. What is he actually doing there? Teaching him things? It’d be cool if he was actually shown, I don’t know, teaching him things.
- The blonde-haired electro dude is starting to bug me in a similar way to Mineta.
- Eri is still cute. Togata is still cool.
- Lots of screentime being given to the inventor girl. Does anyone think the author was pestered into giving her a role again?
It was fine.
(Episode 22)
Disregard what I said last week (or what you just read). I’m actually reinvigorated.
I told this to Karandi and I shall now tell it to all of you: I’m ready to proclaim my opinion that this arc is better than Chisaki’s. Gentle is cooler than Chisaki. I care more about these dumb episodes that likely mean nothing than the world-at-stake drama takedown at Chisaki’s hideout. La Brava is a cutie-pie.
Granted, the season continued to do what it does best and found inappropriate times to incorporate flashbacks and context. Why are we getting these in the middle of Gentle fighting with Midoriya? I don’t want to break the flow of the fight—just fight! Regardless, Gentle and La Brava are such a wholesome pair that I’m beginning to find myself as fond of them as I am the two baddies from the League of Villains. They make this arc worth watching… it just took me about four episodes to realize it.
And maybe it’s because these episodes barely mean anything that I’m willing to give them more of a lenient pass. With Chisaki, all of the stakes attributed made the writing that much more tryhard, that much more poorly-paced in comparison to when it was done better in prior seasons. Here, this is just an isolated case of an antihero (he’s more that than a villain) who feels disregarded by the world. His aim isn’t to kill or pillage or anything like that. His goals are more self-prescribed, and the measures he takes have an almost naive charm. I can absolutely empathize more with that than to take over the world because why not?
I’m starting to lean back more into the “I kind of want to watch more of this,” and hilariously, it’s only because I want to see what else the author does with this dumb pair. Not Midoriya or Bakugo or whoever the hell people are shipping these days, but two random nobodies that just love each other so much that they’re willing to sacrifice themselves for their benefit. I don’t know about anyone else, but that’s cute as fuck. Cue the Snoop Dogg meme.
Karandi
Given I fell a week behind, sorry Kapodaco, I was going to write my thoughts up on these episodes separately but having gotten to the end of episode twenty-two I find myself stuck with barely 5 screen caps and almost no notes. Largely because for a lot of both of these episodes it felt like little outside of the bloated fight between Midoriya and Gentle occurred.
Sure, episode twenty-one took us on a nice tour of the classmates again as they did final preparation for the festival that seems to have taken literally forever to arrive. Only, I’m not overly invested in whether the amateur band and dancers get it together so while these characters remain pleasant they really just feel like they are filling screen time while Midoriya learns another new attack through his new toys the inventor girl made for him and his training with All Might.
Is it just me or is his latest attack a step down? And maybe it’s supposed to be because I guess at least it isn’t going to break any of Midoriya’s bones but it also doesn’t seem like it has a lot of oomph.
Meanwhile the fight between Gentle and Midoriya plays out like a B version of every other fight with both characters justifying their actions and ideals in-between the violent exchanges which were nicely animated, but given Gentle’s persona and quirk it was kind of hard to ever take seriously and by the time episode twenty-two limped to a close I just had to wonder why they even bothered with both his and La Brava’s back story. Just another unnecessary flash back filling in unneeded detail about characters I don’t care about from season four. Honestly, someone should recut this season removing all the flash backs unless they are genuinely plot critical and we’d probably end up with a far more succinct and watchable story.
So at the end of these two episodes other than being kind of relieved that they did at least finally wrap up Gentle’s existence in this story, I was just left wondering what Midoriya was going to do without the rope he went to buy? I’m pretty sure I used to have more thoughts at the end of a My Hero Academia episode, I certainly used to be a lot more invested in the conflicts, and realistically this latest arc has almost definitely assured I won’t be doing seasonal coverage of season 5.
(To see all posts concerning this collab, check out my Collabs page!)
Thank you for your time. Have a great day.
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