- We’ve only gone a quarter of the way through Charlotte, and I can already see two things very clearly. Oh, make that three.
1. This looks, acts, and feels like it wants to be Angel Beats!
2. This almost has the summer P.A. Works show curse written all over it already.
3. When a filler episode is used to introduce another main character, I start to worry a little.
- I chose those words carefully, see.
- Firstly, I do see a lot of Angel Beats! in this. A student council/recruitment agency is replaced by an army (but both are concealed in the one school setting without any other students realising it exists), both shows have manipulative yet kind-hearted female MCs, and both shows have already given off some kind of mysterious air that the world around them is not all that it seems…not to mention the recurring theme of music (in this case being one idol band and one post-rock band).
- Secondly, I am aware of said curse, and this will probably be the last time that I mention it. After what happened when I reviewed Glasslip last year, I’m very desperate that this will come out tops, and prove the curse no longer exists…and it’s all in my head…or something like that. Okay, so perhaps I have turned extremely skeptical over this show so far (I mean this is episode 3 for a show that lasts one season), and by episode 2 I’d discovered one main character that I despised so much that I wasn’t entirely sure why he was written in in the first place, plus as he was the comedy character, it was all to easy to poke fun at him and deem him as a entity in the background, and not a meaningful warm-hearted guy with warm-hearted lines in the show.
- And thirdly, when it comes to filler episodes, I’m never sure whether they’re a good thing or a bad thing. I mean we all know that shows can work very well whether they operate on one whole story or one story with much smaller stories written inside it. The sad fact that I actually had to go back and re-watch last week’s show (so I could remind myself of everything that’s happened so far)…will I have to do the same thing next week? I hope not. Because Nao is an excellent female main character, Ayumi is best imouto this year (although people I know are already questioning me on that, saying that Komachi from Oregairu clearly is…), and this new character clearly shows a lot of potential. Which is always a good thing.
- Perhaps I ought to be optimistic, so why aren’t I? I notice so many people praising the show, but is it because of a comparison to that other P.A. Works/Studio Key show? I really don’t know. We’ve seen KyoAni take Kanon and made it into an entirely different adaptation from its 2002 one (made by Toei Animation), and made Air and Clannad total tear-jerkers. J.C. Staff, meanwhile, took on Little Busters! with very mixed opinion (I liked it, btw). Maybe it is down to pure comparison. In our eyes, we see KyoAni as the forerunners in quality Studio Key adaptations, so we feel either annoyed or concerned when another studio decides to take it on.
- This is only my view of this; I mean any KyoAni adapation wouldn’t feature the level of violence on schoolchildren received not only in Little Busters! but here in Charlotte too. Nao gets slapped after chasing someone down an alleyway and what are we to think? Not the comical violence we accept that Joujirou receives on a daily basis, but a serious “get-the-hell-of-my-way-kid” slap. But at least she doesn’t go on a hissy fit and calls the police; I mean her camcorder is more important. I don’t even know why she feels the need to carry that around in the first place.
- So this hasn’t become the X-men-like show I secretly expected it to be; more like a “come-to-our-academy-so-those-bad-guys-won’t-experiment-on-you” show. Not a bad thing, but oh how interesting it could be. Yuu as Possession Man (okay so he doesn’t exist – I just made that one up), Nao as Susan Storm/Invisible Woman, Joujirou as The Flash, and Misa as The Human Torch.
- Put on paper like that, their special powers sound extremely cool, but the fact that, in the show, they use them not only to manipulate others for their own gain, as well as unnecessarily. Almost like we need some kind of Professor X to teach these kids to use their special powers to good use. And to go outside in silly spandex doing it.