Shameful Otaku Secret!

Her future’s so bright…

I still don’t know what to make of this show. Masamune Shirow and Production IG put their heads together and give us fanservice first, then filler?

Recap

An avatar called Iron Schwartz (I shit you not) from the Metal built for streetfighting, with a propensity for dislocating his opponents’ joints after defeating them, gets uploaded into an android. That android subsequently goes berserk dislocating random shoppers at the mall.

Minamo happens to be in the mall at the time, looking for expensive antique diving sunglasses she can give to Haru. But when she finds them, Schwartz-bot thinks they’re his and starts chasing her all over the place. After a bit of chase scene action, Nyamo-chan runs into a real-fight club where her brother is sitting with Holon, grilling her over her fighting techniques.

Souta, with some help from Holon, manages to give himself an ego boost by defeating the unbeatable Schwartz, but not until after Minamo tries to stop the fight by giving the robot the glasses. Unfortunately, the expensive glasses break, but at the end, Haru bestows his own old ones on her.

Thoughts

There were actually a couple laughs in this episode, mostly from the hilariously brutal droid with the hilariously ridonkulous name, Iron Schwartz. His habit of dislocation is so over the top and gnarly that it’s actually funny, as is the moment when a patron of the fight club tries to shake his hand and gets his head kicked in. It’s like when punches in Fist of the North Star go through people’s faces. You just have to laugh a little. Minamo’s little sunglasses war when she first meets Schwartz has great comic timing too.

But what are they playing at, anyway? Five episodes in, we’ve just barely established the gist of the series, and already we’re blessed with filler? I can’t see how this will have any bearing on the overall story — it didn’t even really have Haru in it. And while we’re complaining: if it can’t have any meaningful plot, why not a little touch of fanservice? You know, outside of those now-infamous and oddly satisfying Real Drive thighs. But Shirow is Shirow, and true to I.G. form, even this episode looked fantastic, so I’d be silly to quit now when they could have so much more in store.

- otou-san out!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Real Drive, sci-fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.