When taking into account the show so far, I find that the quiet character moment stand out far more than the over the top fight scenes with knife wielding psychos on rooftops. The dialogue between characters is much more engaging that two characters jumping around like Bleach Soul Reapers. In particular it great seeing Worick and Nicholas talk especially when Worick’s doing most of the talking while Nicholas is saying the bare minimum. It shows that Worick has been around him for such a long time that he can tell what he wants to say just from his face and movements. The back story about Worick teaching him to write as a kid and being kindred spirits in abusive environments is all really great stuff.
One flaw I found with this episode however was the use of the age old stock character for tragic back stories. The alcoholic abusive father. That’s even above the overbearing religious zealot parent in backstory tropes. A prime example of just how overused this is that before I watched this episode, I watched a DC animated feature called “Superman vs the Elite” (Which despite the title and some lacking animation, was quite a good animated movie) and when it came to a character’s tragic back story time what kind of father had he? Alcoholic abusive father. I certainly are not saying that people like that don’t exist in reality however in cases of entertainment it just seems like a writer taking the easy route instead of building a more morally complex abuser. Or at least something less cliche, like Nicholas’s father who got a twilight prostitute pregnant and decided to make use of the kids abilities as opposed to just getting rid of him. As well as the fact that his father killed his mother. It’s still fairly one dimensional but at least it isn’t a standard trope.
As it turns out Alex wasn’t kidnapped and the visitor turned out to be the doctor like I suspected. Thankfully mangalobe didn’t go to weird heights again as Alex’s hallucinations were in fact the result of withdrawal symptoms from the drug Barry was feeding her to keep her in line. After checking up I am fairly certain this drug was fictitious as well as while there are pimps who use drugs to keep girls in line there aren’t drugs like what was described here. Closest thing to it from what I can find would be a liquid called toluene. Still, made up or not I like how it affected Alex as she went back on the streets prostituting herself over fear of an imaginary Barry. It explains the sudden mental instability of Alex better than a quickly appearing trauma. I a hoping that now without the drugs influence she will become more active in the show as she does need a little more personality. I am hoping for more episodes like this in the future.
While I appreciate this is a critical review and as such you are entitled to your opinion, I can’t help but feel you are demanding too much of a sense of realism from this series when anime by nature is more suited as a fictitious medium of entertainment. While I agree many of the shonen aspects of of gangsta and its brethren is over the top the actual screen time given to these is minimal by many seinen standards e,g, phantom requiem which is also one of my favorite series. Personally i consider this anime to be a pseudo fantasy admittedly with comparisons to Southern Italy in the middle of the last century thus I don’t expect it to comply with what we can call broadly the laws of the universe we ourselves our bound by.
“I can’t help but feel you are demanding too much of a sense of realism from this series when anime by nature is more suited as a fictitious medium of entertainment.”
Realism isn’t quite what I am after. Feasibility is more what I am after. I can accept supernatural elements in a show and I don’t mind the made up drugs all that much. My big issue is that the twilight battles are a huge supernatural shounen element in a story that is otherwise pretty grounded in reality. If the supernatural elements carried into other aspects of the show I wouldn’t quite be as bothered by this, but they don’t. Really, you could keep the twilights in the show and if they just made their fights just a little less over the top then my entertainment would jump up massively. But when I see these guys jumping around rooftops like ninja’s and taking knives to the arms like a flesh wound it just breaks my immersion.