OK, we're at the halfway point now, just 3 more DVDs and I can say I have watched all of this wonderful gift from my grandmother. On with torturing myself. Let's see, first, do we have any decent previews here? No, we do not. Although we DO have a preview for a potentially watchable series: Southern Cross. It's the hunk of Robotech where they have transforming motorcycle/power armor and fight big bulky bugs in a post-apocalyptic foresty wasteland! And the best part is, despite the monsters being big bulky bugs, I'm pretty sure they still managed to rationalize one falling in love with the main character. Scratch that, it's the third one, where they have tanks that turn into tanks with legs. Still, yay for cheesy old mecha anime! Boo to awful new Eva clones (which is what these other previews mainly seem to be for)! Oh, and this one seems to be for a bad anime based on an obscure fighting game. Incidentally, the other "extras" on these DVDs, all of them? The op and ed with no credits on'em, and an "original preview trailer" which is uh... the op with no credits laid over it. The best anime DVD feature I have seen remains Utena's language options menus, all of which just loop different a clip of Chuchu. Rock on. So yeah, enough stalling, on to the awful show.
We start with a montage of someone taking pictures of a 5 year old girl as she engages in various activities like relay racing (OK...) which ends, to show her opening the door because her dad shout be home on her birthday, suddenly cutting to the bloody corpses of her and her mother on the floor. Well, that wasn't particularly expected. Then we have her dad looking at pictures and news clippings later, and grumbling about how monsters suck. Meanwhile, Kazumi seems to have run off somewhere. Possibly to find someone who is more sympathetic to the fact that her parents were killed and filled with bugs like, 2 weeks ago. It turns out Mr. Reporter has her, and is more or less holding her ransom. He's also apparently living across the street watching her through a telescope these days. So far, I don't really see any follow-through from last episode. That's a very good thing. Oh, aha! Mr. Reporter is dead 5 year old's dad! He uses a bunch of hidden cameras to take a bunch of pictures of Jun when she arrives. See, if I haven't mentioned it, they keep making a big deal of how you can tell Jun has monster powers because of how her eyes flash when she gets her picture taken... she's a professional model though, so I guess most people just really aren't that observant, plus there's no real special effect, it's just something of a stated fact. Mr. Reporter has some weirdo bum chained to a pole in his back yard. A quick montage from the first episode reminds us, any guys chained to poles are monsters. This guy has a big mouth on his stomach. Anyway, Mr. Detective is using this monstrobum to try and get Jun to reveal her true monsterous form and confess to the killing of all the various people other monsters killed when she was in the general area... and various people who turned into monsters that she really did kill, which is harder to deny. He's then distracted by some random monster kid (oh hey, the one from episode 3 who turned into a butterfly) sneaking up to give his whole superiority speech. Oh, and it turns out Mr. Bum has a HUUUUUUUUUUGE mouth on his stomach He's real goofy looking. Meanwhile, HA agents are off trying to kill a straight-up purple amorphous octo-tentacle monster. Quick glimpse of random goons getting dropped, then back to Stomach Bum and Butterfly Boy menacing Jun and Mr. Reporter. Evidently Butterfly Boy killed Mr. Reporter's daughter because she complained about how creepy he was. And MAN Stomach bum is great. I really wish it were easier to convey how absolutely silly looking most of these monsters are. So anyway, we keep cutting back and forth between Jason (fighting Tentake elsewhere) and Butterfly Boy both grumbling about how Jun's such a big insecure baby about turning into a monster and killing stuff, and I totally agree. What's the big freakin' deal ya wimp? You don't even look silly like everyone else (well, except the hair). I say just buy baggier clothes, and monster out willy-nilly! Anyway, eventually Mr. Reporter realizes that Jun's more of a superhero than a murderous monster, and politely turns his back so she can get on with the monster killing without having to worry about her secret identity being exposed. She kills Stomach bum by ripping his biggest upper jaw off, which is weird, because it's not actually attached to the rest of him to begin with. The top half of him just floats above the bottom half with teeth all around, and yet, yanking it upwards killed it anyway. OK... Mr. Reporter has second thoughts and goes to take her picture after, but notices she's crying, like she always does after killing monsters. Butterfly Boy summons a couple more monsters to drag things out, but Mr. Reporter wants to get this episode over with, so he throws a bucket of gasoline on him, grabs him, and sets all non-Jun monsters, and the house (and uh, himself) on fire. The fight scene across town is just boring. Butterfly Boy doesn't die, because he's now an official recurring villain. He grows butterfly wings and flies off, and summons another dozen or so monsters as backup so he can properly slink into the night. Asuka calls Jun a wimp later, because she hasn't had a chance to this episode.
Kazumi is chained to a column in the desert. Why? Because she got into modeling. "Hey, did they ever solve your parents' murder case?" "No." "Do you remember what the guy looked like?" "..." Later, some random person is impaled on a giant spear in the middle of the street. The girl asking the earlier question sees this, and runs into a back alley to puke/monster out. This is probably a bad sign for our token moe character (ooh, look at me, using my new Japanese buzzword! LOL BAKA NAAAA-NIIII! Ahem). A bit later, Kazumi looks out the window and sees a crow in the distance, silhouetted against the sun, and carrying a human corpse. I should probably have mentioned by now that crows are this episodes Big Theme Animal, and what Butterfly Boy's backup monsters kinda looked like, but a quick glance earlier in this paragraph shows how on the game I am. Kazumi flashbacks to the day her parents were killed. This flashback includes her hopping into the bathtub and adding the powder that makes the water orange. Huh. I always thought orange bath water was some sort of visual shorthand for "no, this girl isn't naked for you to ogle, just coincidentally naked, like the whole nippleless boobs bit (which we also have featured in this flashback). Evidently though, it's a real thing. Anyway, she then goes to check out her house, sees Butterfly Boy and a crow monster, freaks out. Also, it's evidently traffic lights the crow monsters are into impaling people on, not big spears. My mistake. Anyway, Jun's cruising around town with Maeda, because Asuka's in America treating Jason like dirt for a change I guess, or maybe being nice to him, they aren't shown, so take your pick. There's no sappiness or sleaziness on display, which really doesn't speak well for this show continuity wise. Anyway, more crows killing people, more freaking out, Kazumi has more flashbacks/a total nervous breakdown. Not a small percentage of this episode is recycled from earlier. Anyway, outside her head, Kazumi is surrounded by something like 50 werecrows, and passes out. Butterfly Boy finds Jun and taunts her, then encourages her to come fly off to a more suitable fight scene location by dragging catatonic Kazumi around. When they get there, Kazumi puts 1 and 1 together and realizes that the naked girl who looks just like her roommate but maybe 10 cm taller and with a retarded haircut is her roommate. Then Jun gets KOed by crows, has a chain net dropped on her with a junkyard magnet, pecked at by crows a bit, makes the crows explode through sheer power of righteous indignation (seriously) and Butterfly Boy takes his hostage and runs. I think we can officially call Butterfly Boy and the crows a plot arc at this point. It's not much, but I'll take what I can get at this point.
Episode 13 there is definitely looking like an isolated incident of Wrong, so the show's settling back into boring land now. The op song is some Latin chanty thing. At a stretch, it sounds at one point like it says "Sell a MONGOOSE! With LASERRRRRS!" Anyway, episode. I don't think I'm really getting across in these summaries how much of the average episode is dead air in the form of random background HA goons muttering about nothing in particular, Jun moping, and random people being shown puttering around town, and silently sitting around in cars. That percentage is Most. There's like 5 minutes worth of actual episode content per episode, much of which is in 3 second flashes between stretches of dead air. For instance, this guy drooling over a girl's corpse in an alley is all that happened of note while I typed as I typed out that long aside. Butterfly Boy encourages him to eat her. Jun flashes back YET AGAIN to the Dead Kazumi's Parents ep. We have seriously gone over this footage more than enough in this little arc. Anyway, she finds Kazumi at her house, and the two of them finally show some freakin' emotion over the whole dead parents bit. Read: They cry until a random HA goon comes along to take Jun off to kill a monster (so, they cry for like 5 seconds). This monster looks kinda like Godzilla, and like a frog, and has two Thrakazog tongues. Most monsters seem to have at least 1 Thrakazog tongue. Frogzilla here also has acidic drool, and the corners of his mouth seem to be somewhere around his ankles. Way less silly looking than most honestly, but there's always hope of more crazy details when we get a better viewing angle. Oh, OK, the frog face isn't on its head, it's on or near at least one foot. That's pretty silly. Godzilla with frogs for feet (or maybe just one frog). Still, not a top 10 contender by any means. Meanwhile, Kazumi suggests to Jun that she give up the business of monstering out and killing monsters, because it's kinda freaky, and cuts into their hugging and crying time. On a related note, Frogzilla is officially rampaging through town and has been for some time, why HASN'T she been called out to monster hunt yet? Eventually a news helicopter shows up to film it, and people worry about the public becoming aware of uh... the giant frog/lizard thing stomping through the shinjuku district. OK, can we drop the pretense of this whole monster thing being kept a secret from the public already? I mean, come on people, plausibility. Meanwhile, Kazumi somehow paralyzes Jun, grows a big long purple tail, and turns out to be a monster in disguise. A random HA dude, or maybe it's Maeda, shows up to shoot her, snapping Jun out of it so we can have a proper fight. The monster is a big pink Salamander with Kazumi's face on its forehead. Also not really a contender. She skips fighting it for now (huh? She just leaves it in her apartment for HA dude to deal with?) and flies off to fight Frogzilla, because military helicopters aren't doing the trick. She gets scolded some for not coming to the fight when it started, probably a couple hours ago, when there wasn't a reporter present, but meh. Giant Monster Fight! I don't know why I always type that so enthusiastically because they tend to be over in like 3 anticlimactic seconds, but still, on general principle. Butterfly Boy taunts her real quick afterwards, then she goes back to her apartment to find a beat up conciliatory Maeda and... seriously, did we just monstrify and kill off a major character out of the blue, offscreen, with no real followup, or did we kill a shapeshifter disguised as her. If it's the former, what the heck? If it's the latter, you really should have indicated thus somewhere. Guess I'll have to go by the presence or lack of emotional fallout next episode.
We start with a crazy montage of a helicopter gunning down an amusingly varied collection of monsters who were evidently hiding in a church, followed by the people inside (random HA goon and Asuka) having a brief exchange in wonderfully mis-inflected Engrish. Finally, some decent payoff for watching all this subbed. There was engrish earlier too, but not as funny. Anyway, time for another photo shoot, or more likely, dream sequence, because halfway through it Jun monsters out and kills everyone else present, then has Butterfly Boy appear and taunt, and all the corpses turn into various people she knew before they monstered out and were killed. So yeah, evidently last episode we arbitrarily had the 2nd or 3rd most important character arbitrarily turn into a monster and get killed. Wow. That's pretty frelling random! She decides to quit her day job, because, well, she just had a dream about killing all of'em, and let's face it, this show is cliched enough that they all COULD turn out to be monsters and need a good killing. Apparently though, Butterfly Boy and his crows are going around killing modeling agency people to mess with her anyway, so she really should have gone in that day. She decides it's probably not a good day to go to her night job either (or possibly Japanese FBI (what's it called again?)) questioning, but either way, she immediately changes her mind and gets in the gov'ment goon car anyway. Other goons tell her modeling boss not to expect to see her again in either case. Elsewhere, a zombieish (attitude wise) looking shmoe is puttering his way home to his total trash heap of a home to talk to the rotting corpses of his parents about how his day sucked. They're starting to stink up the place, so he opens a window to air it out, and sees Butterfly Boy hovering around upside down. Butterfly Boy has him ride the elevator to the basement and talk about his psychological problems says generic badguy leader things to him. Asuka apparently sent word back to the home office to toss Jun into her padded room for a while, which I'd say is honestly pretty prudent at this point. Way harder for Butterfly Boy to show up and taunt her there, and although he could turn into a butterfly and sneak in, no way he could bring goons. Oh, and hey, it turns out it WAS a shapeshifter after all, because here's Kazumi back at the apt. grumbling at how Jun's off somewhere. Meanwhile, they decorate the padded room with a giant poster of Jun. They also dope her up, because she's evidently jonesing for some monster killing. Zombie-Otaku-Dead-Parents (who I will call ZODP until I see what sort of silly monster he turns into) is sitting around with Butterfly Boy saying "See? Isn't it wonderful to unleash your powers?" which I find hilarious, because what he's doing at that exact moment is painting a Mazinger-Z model. Anyway, Jun's freaking out some more and being haunted by visions of the two lesbian stalker monsters she had to kill back to back oddly enough taunting her about how she seemed to enjoy killing them. Then she wakes up, all crazy like, hallucinates that her nurse is a monster when she comes to see what's wrong (just like my Silent Hill theory!) and slashes at her in a clothes-ripping off way (presented in creepy fanservice vision, read, you see nipples), then gets distracted by her poster on the wall, and just starts uh... savagely beating the wall until she starts bleeding. Yeah, she's kinda crazy today. HA goons burst in to shoot her some (although the nurse is fine besides mental trauma) and she flys out into the night for some general carnage and mayhem and being chased by the military. Then finally, Asuka comes back from her trip to America to calm her the @#$% down. She's actually fairly nice about it for a change of pace too. "Jun, I won't let you die. ... Not yet." Well, passes as nice for her. A bunch of crows are hovering around Jun's apartment, but Kazumi's hanging out with her new modeling boss, and Jun's off freakin' out, so, really, who cares? Anyway, episode over.
I'm going to go ahead and count episode 17 as echi episode #3, on the really thin basis of a brief nipple flash or two. Basically, I just want to do this because episode 13 has to count as at LEAST 1.9 episodes for wrongness, and thus any crumbs will up the total when part of that surplus gets added in. Really though, aside from that brief foray into Full On $#@%ed Up Land, and being way too vague on whether or not you killed a major character, still on track thus far for a totally boring and predictable angsty fight of the week show. If I'd been so inclined, I probably could have guessed after 2 or 3 episodes when they'd have the main-character-totally-freaks-out-about-all-the-monster-killing episode.
I'd love to make a 26 episode series and just totally frell with the standards of pacing established by everything else some time. Shark jump in like episode 2, kill off a major character in the middle of what looks like an ep 13 clipshow, end the main plot in like, ep 21 and have a ton of aftermath...