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Alt title: Mean Girls^3

Alt title 2: Harold, they're lesbians

Last episode rating: 4.86 out of 5 stars (7 votes)

Hmmmm.... kind of disappointing after last week's episode? We don't really learn that much about the core characters, with maybe one notable exception.

Did they film like 2 hours of high school girl bullying and cut it down to 19 out of 20 minutes of the show? This episode spends an uncomfortable amount of time focusing on the bullying, and almost no time on anything else. Like, it has maybe three girls who are important, and they don't do anything to establish any of them. Honestly, I couldn't tell you who Atsumi was if they don't say her name, and I was double confused when we saw the flashback to Kanae's past. It barely functions as a story, which is confusing since it was so well done in the previous episode. Maybe the writer got drunk and didn't turn in a script, so they just had some girls ad lib it for 2 hours.

I always have a problem with the Makai Knights going "Oh, it's just people being jerks. Moving on~" Like even if you ignore that it's a TV show and everything's connected, in-world, these guys know that Horrors come from evil in people's hearts (although Ryuugverse stuff seems to blur it to be negative emotions). Maybe there'd be less crime in your neighborhood if you did some community outreach and fixed things socially! I dunno, it seemed like maybe they were going to comment on Jinga being full blown wrong to ignore the girl from earlier, but it doesn't seem like Jinga acknowledges his mistake or learned anything from the experience. Another disappointment.

Finally, Jinga can cure people of being Horrors. That sure would have been nice in the last episode, would have been two less orphans in the world. But he does it by being bitten on the hand and getting a Horror infection? It's an interesting plot development and it's a game changer since nothing like this has been done before in the series.

I guess in a show where you're exploring the blurred line between good and evil, human and Horror, there wouldn't be much examination of that ambiguity if everything was predetermined to be "Horrors are always bad and must die". That said, I don't know how to feel about this episode, since I was rooting for Kanae to kill all those bullies, and was confused when she fails to. But from the flashback, you can see Kanae herself was a bully, but maybe that was in her past? Again, the storytelling is so poor that it's too difficult to come to any sort of conclusion other than there's not enough information.

Poor second showing. Let's hope the next episode is better.

Huh, seems the theme of this series might be Horror redemption, kinda interested to know why that's happening, first Jinga gets reborn, now this girl doesn't die and turns back into a human.

I imagine it's probably something nefarious despite being a good thing.

Okay, where did high school girls get those heavy chains?

A couple years ago there was a high schooler going around and putting toothpicks in unsold convenience store snacks and then uploading the videos to youtube, made all the major news networks, don't tell me that this obvious and very violent bullying wouldn't immediately get smacked down once uploaded.

Xirix wrote: ↑Thu Oct 11, 2018 9:00 pm Huh, seems the theme of this series might be Horror redemption, kinda interested to know why that's happening, first Jinga gets reborn, now this girl doesn't die and turns back into a human.

And they made the Horror in the previous episode sympathetic too. I think it's an interesting take on Garo, although depending on where they take things in the series, it might be problematic for future stories.

First, if some Horrors aren't actually evil, but they're only other choice is to be murdered by an ex-husband or a pack of bullies, does that really meet the qualification for becoming a Horror? In the past, most Horrors were more or less obviously evil characters. It just complicates things and makes it harder for you to root for a guy with a sword cutting them down.

Second, any other Garo series after this is going to avoid sympathetic Horrors altogether. Otherwise, the audience can go "Why didn't that Makai Knight save that Horror? You can cure people of being a Horror, since it happened in the Jinga series."

Not necessarily, naturally it's too early to tell but maybe the reason the girl got saved was something to do with Jinga himself, when he cut her Horror form the cut was blue-ish, if this is some kind of special ability that only Jinga has then it's not going to really affect future Garo stuff.

Well, Horror Jinga is coming back next episode from the look of the preview, so my guess is that it has something to do with him being an ex-Horror that got bitten by an Horror.
Maybe he'll seal them inside himself now instead of the sword.
I think that's why they made the Horrors sympathetic this time, since every others Horrors stories we were shown ended up with just Horrors eating people, which gotten annoying since it basically stole time for the plot.
Funny thing, they wasted less time on showing Horrors killing and eating on all the Ryuuga continuity, which is one of the reason why I tend to prefer that continuity to the others.
Here, it's like they'll going to actually do something with it that's not just showing that Horrors are just good to be killed.

I remember the first Garo series also spend a fair bit of time on how the Horror came about, it was only till the later half that Kouga came into focus. I did like that format than. Made it seem like a real Horror show.

so Jinga can make Horror victims human again? gee that would have come in handy after what happened last episode, would have cut down the amount of orphans in the Garo universe

regardless I thought the episode did felt a little inferior to episode 0. Hope it's the exception

@Takenoko 1st post : wow a review from someone else never have been so accurate to what I'm thinking. Felt like you read my mind on all the points xD

After watching it raw I was really upset to feel bored by a GARO franchise episode. cause it didn't happen that much throughout the shows for me (maybe during Raiga's time most).

It's the clear opposite of Ep0. Ep0 was praised because in one episode, it could shove in so many plot points AND victim of the week backstory without feeling forced or cramped. It was a lesson of good writing for other toku shows.

But now this Ep1... eh... focusing 3/4 of the time on the highschool girls felt really boring. I guess it was so that we really have all the elements on the girl backstory, because she will be the first horror to revert back o a human. but still. Still didn't felt like a GARO episode.

I think I could accept it more easily if the show was a 25 episodes show. But it's a 13 episodes show who can't waste too much time.
To compare it with Dragon Blood, I don't remember an episode who gave me this feeling. Because even some episode who didn't make the plot progress much and focused a lot on the victim of the week, those still managed to make Rei/Alice/Rekka interact with each other in the middle of all the search/fight vs the horror.

But I admit the last minute plot twist kinda saved the episode to not be complete waste.
The fact horrors can revert back to human and can have redemption somehow is a really interesting new theme.

Yeah, it's a bummer. I guess it says highly of Garo as a series, since utter failure of episodes like this one are pretty rare. I know a lot of people work on these episodes, but I kind of want to blame the writer for this one (he's different from the writer for episode 0). If you look at the dialogue, there's BARELY anything being said that really tells a story. Like what the fuck does the script for this episode look like? I swear most of those lines are improvised.

Even the ending feels kind of lazy. Are those the same girls who were the bullies? Why is everyone getting along? Is Atsumi there, I legitimately cannot tell. If someone told me that the director just wanted to film some girls slapping each other for fun, I'd totally have believed them.

omnikaiser wrote: ↑Sat Oct 13, 2018 11:02 pm But I admit the last minute plot twist kinda saved the episode to not be complete waste.
The fact horrors can revert back to human and can have redemption somehow is a really interesting new theme.

Yeah exactly. If I can play episode doctor, I'd probably have cut out half of the school girl bullying stuff out, and moved the twist more toward the halfway point. Then spend the last half of the episode with the core characters trying to figure out what happened and maybe have an epilogue for the school girls.

Maybe we are dealing with a different type of horror? We have had slab horrors with Raiga that required that girl to seal them, and Madou horrors that were invisible to most standard detection methods with Ryuga. Maybe this is a new breed of horror whose gates are invisible to Madogu and who possess humans in a manner that is different from normal horrors, where posession kills the host.

The bulk of the episode felt like some of the early Makai Senki episodes, where they spend a lot of time focusing on how the horror forms and them killing people before the Knight comes in and kills them.

The ending was unique at least. If this Jinga is reincarnated from the previous one, then possibly he is passively absorbing horrors again (or did previously which lead to him killing his Dad) without realising it.

It was knight to see the sword purifier again. I'm fairly certain we haven't seen that since the original series?

Catastrophe wrote: ↑Sun Oct 14, 2018 9:41 amIt was knight to see the sword purifier again. I'm fairly certain we haven't seen that since the original series?

Ryuga did in Goldstorm Ep1

Skeptical of how the wham of this episode is any good. This MOTW could be brought up again at some point.

Good action.

My random thoughts on the first episode:

There seems to be two different types of horrors here. The first type was a regular horror formed from the girl who committed suicide in the storage room (that was roped off by police tape when Jinga got there). This horror didn't have a chance to propagate and stained Jinga's sword on death. The second type was formed from the traitor girl's tears on the chain. (No idea how the horror got into the chain. It could not have been a chain that the girl gang used to bind the suicide girl because the police would have taken it as evidence.) Traitor girl may have been different than suicide girl because she had strong feelings of guilt rather than hatred. This could have produced a different type of horror, one that doesn't kill the host and doesn't stain the sword on death. The new horror didn't kill the girl gang immediately and maybe was only going to teach them a lesson. But, since it was a horror, it had no love for a Makai Knight.