blaze it
- Aldnoah.Zero is just not a very interesting show anymore.
- I’m not even completely sure why, honestly. I guess there are a lot of reasons?? The amount of time it spends on pointless, formulaic mech battles between Team Inaho and random Martians is definitely one of them. In a longer series that could have worked fine – but with only 24 episodes, they’re just wasting valuable time that could have been used to develop characters or establish the world. With only two episodes left, we’re clearly in the FINALE ZONE – and there are still a lot of big questions that I no longer expect to be answered. What was life actually like on Vers, aside from the few brief descriptions we’ve been given? Who exactly was Slaine’s dad? Are there any interesting twists regarding the Aldnoah and the civilization that originally created it? I guess none of that matters, because this is really just a story about a few people.
- The handling of the characters has arguably been even worse. There’s this huge cast, but who actually matters to the story at this point? Basically just Slaine, Inaho, and Asseylum. Saazbaum was important before he died I guess, Mazuurek at least accomplished something as a plot device (and seems to have vanished since then), and Rayet once felt like a major character even if her role in the story was not all that significant. Everyone else? Pretty much completely forgettable. Calm and Nina are literally just kind of THERE, and despite being treated as part of the main cast, I’m not sure they’ve ever done anything significant. I don’t feel like I’ve even seen some of the more minor characters at all recently, like the doctor guy or the girl Magbaredge would always obnoxiously lecture about getting dates or whatever, but I could just be forgetting them because they’ve been so unimportant. And the rest of them (Inko, Yuki, Marito, etc) exist to fulfill a necessary role in the story, but they don’t feel like they have any real agency in it, which just makes them not all that interesting to watch.
- Of course, I still wouldn’t say the three main protagonists are good characters by any means. Slaine, as I’ve discussed a lot previously, just feels like a waste of potential. Seeing this guy become the villain of the series could have been interesting, but the way it actually went down was just too stupid for me to care about. He changed because the story needed him to, and never at any point did it feel natural or compelling. Now he’s basically just a teenage Saazbaum, who is somehow even less likable than the original.
Well WHY did you even fucking kill him then
- Inaho… really hasn’t changed much at all since the first episode, which is to say he’s still the same bland, emotionless, ridiculously overpowered guy we’ve probably all grown to hate by now. Okay, I guess he now has a real “flaw” of sorts – it’s become apparent that his robo-eye will the biggest challenge for him to overcome in this story, assuming it doesn’t outright kill him in the end. But just like Slaine’s transformation, this plot point just feels totally unnatural. This isn’t a story about the DANGERS OF TECHNOLOGY, it’s about mech battles and interplanetary politics and a fucked up love triangle – and yet the best thing they could come up with for the protagonist’s downfall was some random prosthetic eye he acquired halfway through the series. Not to mention that Inaho hasn’t really been ACTING any differently than he used to – he’s doing the exact same kind of stuff with the eye that he was doing with his brain throughout the first season. There was never a clear difference between the two until suddenly relying on the eye was a bad thing.
- And then there’s Asseylum – who, after spending more than half the new season floating unconscious in a tube, has been literally reduced to a princess getting rescued from a castle. She showed some promise in episode 9 when she tricked Slaine into revealing his true intentions and pointed a gun at him… only for it all to be ruined by Slaine calmly walking up and disarming her with no resistance. Maybe she’ll still get her chance to be the hero before it’s over, but right now it seems like the only development from the first season she’s actually retained is falling in love with Inaho.
- What else is there to talk about? Klancain is a thing I guess. I’m curious to see where the story is going with him, but I also can’t help but feel like it’s too late to be introducing such a (seemingly) important character. Will he do anything that couldn’t have just been accomplished with Mazuurek? Hell, as ridiculous as it sounds, I honestly think it would have been more interesting to bring Cruhteo himself back somehow than just having his previously unmentioned son turn up out of nowhere at the last minute.
